Jerome: Name Day and Patron Saint

Saint Jerome was born into a Christian family in Stridon, on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia, and was sent to Rome to study. For a time he was drawn to worldly pleasures, but he turned his life around and was baptized when he was about twenty. After a journey to Gaul he resolved to give himself wholly to God as a monk. When his parents died he first cared for his younger sisters and his brother Paulinian, and he began a deep study of the Scriptures. Around 374 he withdrew to the desert of Chalcis near Antioch for about five years, where he lived in prayer and fasting and learned Hebrew. He was ordained a priest at Antioch and came to know Saint Gregory the Theologian and Saint Gregory of Nyssa in Constantinople. In 381 he went to Rome, where Pope Damasus made him his secretary, but his sharp words about the morals of the city made him enemies, and after three years he left Rome for good. In 386 he settled in a cave near the place of the Nativity in Bethlehem and lived there in great austerity. He wrote much, and his greatest work was a new Latin translation of the Old and New Testaments, the Vulgate, which came into use throughout the Western Church. He lived to grieve the sack of Rome in 410 and to see Bethlehem attacked in 411, and he reposed in his cave around 420. The Church remembers him on 15 June (28 June on the Old Calendar).

What the faithful pray for

• students and scholars
• translators and all who study the Scriptures
• love for the word of God
• those who struggle to turn from old habits
• patience under criticism and slander