On September 30, the Church celebrates the memory of Saint Jerome. Besides having translated the Bible, he was an example of a combative and polemical man, as saints should be.

Newsdesk (30/09/2021 09:26, Gaudium Press)

If we ask any theologian who Saint Jerome was, he will certainly answer us: “he is the translator of the Bible”; if we ask the same question to someone else, he might say: “he is the saint who had a pet lion”; if we could inquire the saint himself, he would say: “I am a monk”. In fact, these are the three main characteristics of this Church Father: religious, interpreter of God, and friend of the lion.

Although they are very different qualities, they have a common cause: a great love for God. To serve God perfectly, he became a monk; to make Him known, he translated His words into the language of the West; to defend Him, he became the lion of his Church.

The first two points are simple to understand, the question is the third.

We will not dwell on the veracity of the story of St. Jerome’s adoption of the lion; what is certain is that it is quite symbolic: the saint was for his time a roaring lion, denouncing the sins and defects of his contemporaries. Like a lion, he retired to the desert; like a lion he was not afraid to present himself in the open field of polemics, terrorizing with his roar and attacking heretics with his claws; and, like the Lion of Judah, he was soon besieged by the serpents of hypocrisy, by the poison of slander, by the Pharisees who exist in all times.

In fact, they could not stand statements like these:

“It pains me to say how many [consecrated] virgins fall each day, how many the Holy Church loses from her bosom. […] Some, when they realize that they have criminally conceived, prepare abortion poisons, and it often happens that, dying also, they descend into hell, defendants of a triple crime: murderers of themselves, adulteresses of Christ, and parricides of the unborn child.” (Letter 22).[1]

“Virginity is also lost by thought. [Religious women who sin in this way] are the bad virgins, virgins in the flesh but not in the spirit” (Letter 22).

“There are others, and I speak of men of my [priestly] state, who aspire to the priesthood and the diaconate in order to be free to find women at will” (Letter 22).

“The Apostle condemns the priest given to wine, and the ancient law of Leviticus forbids it (10:9). […] Flee from anything that makes you drunk and makes you lose your mind” (Letter 52).

And what did his enemies do, those who felt attacked by the words of Saint Jerome? The same as always: unfounded calumnies, coming from lying witnesses; silence in the face of his arguments; condemnation after the declaration of his innocence: “He is not persecuted for his alleged scandals, but for his writings, his denunciations, for having himself given the example of the contrary.”[2]

This “senate of Pharisees” (as he called it) thus accused themselves of the vices denounced by the saint, as he himself had warned: “No one I have injured, at least no one in concrete was portrayed in my descriptions, and to no one in particular was my speech directed. I dealt with vices in general. If anyone is angry with me, he is confessing to be so himself” (Letter 52).

Of course, hypocrites can’t stand it if the whole truth is told, because it hurts their conscience, as Sulpice Severus already stated: “An incessant struggle and an uninterrupted duel against the wicked have concentrated in Jerome the hatreds of the perverse. In him, the heretics hate the one who never ceases to attack them; the clergymen hate the one who recriminates their lives and their crimes. But all virtuous men love and admire him.”[3]

We can say that one of St. Jerome’s greatest glories was this: to have been one of the greatest defenders of the Church in his time, to have denounced vice and praised virtue, to have revived the notion of good and evil, and to have been persecuted for love of justice (cf.)

Would that we had other Jeronimos in our days who attacked contemporary vices!

By Miguel de Souza Ferrari

[1] SAN JERÓNIMO. Obras completas: Epistolario. vol. 10. Madrid: BAC, 2013, p. 177-178. (The remaining quotations from St. Jerome’s letters are from this edition).

[2] BERNET, Anne. Saint Jerôme. Clovis, 2002, p. 287-288.

[3] SULPITIUS SEVERUS. Dialogus I, 9. CSEL 1,101; SCh 510, 137.