A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. A discussion arose among the disciples as to which of the disciples was the greatest. Jesus, who knew their thoughts, took a little child and placed the child beside himself, after which he said to the disciples, whoever welcomes this little child on my account welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes him who sent me. For the least among you is the greatest. It was John who said, master, we saw a man using your name to expel demons, and we tried to stop him because he was not of our company.
Jesus replied, do not stop him, for any man who is not against you is on your side. And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise to you, lord Jesus Christ. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Well, today, we have the feast of saint Jerome, priest and doctor of the church.
Now remember, he was a contemporary of Saint Augustine of Hippo, and Saint Augustine's dates are 03/1954 to 04/30. You should try to remember those dates because there, Saint Augustine, as you know, of Hippo is the great landmark, the watershed, you name it, of now notice I'm going to say, a western Christendom. Just didn't say of the Catholic church, but a western Christendom. And he still is. He is the great doctor of the West.
That is Saint Augustine of Hippo. Now, Augustine was flourishing in Northern Africa, roughly just south of the toe of Italy across the Mediterranean. Saint Jerome starts in well, he didn't start, but he came to Rome from around Dalmatia and became interested in scripture. He was an ascetic of of sorts. He was a man, you can say, of various sorts.
Anyway, he gets to Rome. That is Saint Jerome now. He gets to Rome, and then he goes east, and he winds up in Bethlehem, which of course, as you know, isn't far from Jerusalem. And in Bethlehem, he's established a monastery. Now that's all.
And then he was a great well, he was a a spiritual leader to a select group of people, especially ladies and especially wealthy ladies. But the thing that Augusta I mean, that that Jerome is remembered for, his importance to Western culture, his essential contribution to the church of the West is his translation of the bible into Latin, which we call the Vulgate because the Latin language was the vulgar language of the day, the language of the crowd, of the people. So that you have Jeron then flourishing over in Bethlehem, not far from Jerusalem, and you have Augustine in the Northern part of Africa, hippo. And Augustine is a bishop. He's an ecclesiastic and a very active one and a prolific writer.
He also was interested in scripture. And we have a number of letters interchanged from Augustine and Saint Jerome. And let me tell you, in confidence, which is a kind of a confidence that is shared by all the world, like most secrets are, you know. They had very different points of view on a number of subjects. And some of their especially Jerome's letters were they were pretty barbed because Jerome had a very vitriolic pen.
I scare I have grave doubts that Saint Jerome would have made sainthood if he had to go through the present ordeal. He was quite a man. Quite a man. But the thing I want to emphasize among other things is his contribution in his translation of the scriptures into Latin. Now he didn't translate the whole bible, but he translated a lot of it.
And he did it by himself. I emphasize, he did it alone. Now he may have had secretaries to help him to do the actual writing. There were little scores of IBM typewriters were scarce in those days, especially around Bethlehem. But the the it's incredible, the work he did.
Now he tried to go back to the original text that remember, there were some Latin texts in existence. Of course, there were. Saint Augustine uses them. We have some of them. Saint Augustine didn't know Greek.
Now Jerome was he knew Greek and he knew Hebrew, or at least he certainly thought he did. And he worked with great rapidity, and I emphasize again, he had no tools. You just think of what today translating the bible means. It means you assemble a corporation. You assemble a whole 25 or 30 scholars, and you give each man a little bit of the book to translate.
Then you have a number of editors, then you have sub editors, then you have an editor in chief, and you stick it all on a computer, and you bring it out, and it's all sizzling. You get the fire extinguishers to put out the heat. It's all a big game. But Jerome did it alone. And he did it almost off the cuff.
Many much of it was done off the cuff. Now here's the point. That Latin text that Jerome put his name to was the bible of the West until the sixteenth century. Until the sixteenth century. And at the council of Trent, Trent said that the word of God, as far as disputation is concerned, as far as the Catholic church is concerned in debating with the Protestants, the official text is the Vulcan.
As far as I know, it still is. That doesn't mean you can't go back to the Greek. You can. But if you're going to use a translation, the official translation of the Catholic church is the Latin, and that is as far as I know, I'm I may be wrong on this, but as far as I know, it is still the Latin of Jerome. Because after all, if you take the new translation that is into Latin, much of that is drawn right out of Jerome.
And so, as I say, as I stand here in Garrett Park this morning in this year of our Lord, 1985, I can't emphasize the influence of this man Jerome on Western culture, not just upon religion, but upon culture. He is the one who put the bible into the hands of the people who could read Latin. And remember, Latin was the common language for the whole Western world going all the way from from the the the Mediterranean in the East all the way West to Spain and beyond. That was the that was the language even in Columbus' time. In the sixteenth century, Erasmus wrote Latin.
Saint Thomas More wrote Latin when they wanted to write something for people to read. And so today, when we now I'm I I wanna leave this thought with Saint Jerome is a very complex character. I'm not holding him up as a great ideal. I can't get enthusiastic about him at all. But you've got to admit what he did.
And what he did was fantastic. When you think of it as a work of one man without he had no dictionaries. He had no anthologies. He had no concordances. He had nothing except his brain and what his brain retained to do that translation.
And that translation of Jerome existed and persisted right down to the sixteenth century, and it still was that when I was studying theology, that was our text. It was the Vulcan of Saint Jerome. And I don't go back to the sixteenth century, believe it or not. And so we paid tribute to this man. He loved holy scripture because he looked upon it as the word of God.
But I want to remind you, that is not a the word of god is not a translation. Keep that in mind. The translations are one man or a group of men or women. It's what they think that they make out of the original text. So when I praise translators, I wanna emphasize the importance of the manus not manuscripts, but of the original language of the scriptures.
And the original language is Hebrew and Greek. And we are losing those languages in the Catholic church because we're losing the scholarship of to to master them. We're losing them. Plenty of men are being ordained priests now who have absolutely no Greek and no Hebrew at all. None at all.
They can't read the authentic texts. Well, that's another story. I hope Jerome isn't too sad about it, but he has every reason maybe to shed some bitter tears. But let us today at least rejoice and be glad we had a Saint Jerome, and by the grace of God, maybe we can have a few more in the year of our Lord 1985. At least we can read translations of the word of God.
In the name of the father, and of the son, and of holy spirit. Amen.