A reflection for S. Hieronymi Presbyteri Confessoris et Ecclesiæ Doctoris — III classis (30 September)
Feria Quarta infra Hebdomadam XVIII post Octavam Pentecostes · IV. Septembris
Qui autem fecerit et docuerit, hic magnus vocabitur in regno cælorum. “But he that shall do and teach, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” — Matt. 5:19
I. The Liturgical Context
On this Wednesday of the eighteenth week after Pentecost, the ferial Mass gives way to the feast of the man to whom the Latin Church owes, more than to any other single scholar, the very words in which she has read her Scriptures for sixteen centuries. St. Jerome died at Bethlehem on the thirtieth of September in the year 420, an old man worn out by study, penance and controversy, within sight of the cave where the Word was made flesh. The Church keeps his dies natalis with the Mass In medio Ecclesiæ from the Common of Doctors, but she gives him a Collect of his own, and in it she calls him what she calls no other of her teachers: Doctorem maximum — the greatest Doctor — in exponendis sacris Scripturis, for the expounding of the Sacred Scriptures.
The Introit sets the scene: In medio Ecclesiæ aperuit os eius, et implevit eum Dominus spiritu sapientiæ et intellectus — “In the midst of the Church the Lord opened his mouth, and filled him with the spirit of wisdom and understanding” (Ecclus. 15:5). The phrase is precise. The Doctor does not speak from outside the Church, nor over her, but in medio — from the centre of her life, and because the Lord opened his mouth. His authority is received before it is exercised.
The two readings of the Mass then divide the doctor’s vocation between them. The Epistle (2 Tim. 4:1-8) is the last testament of a teacher at the end of his course. The Gospel (Matt. 5:13-19) is the charter given to teachers at the beginning of theirs. Between them stands the Collect’s single petition, which is the key to the whole day: that we may practise quod ore simul et opere docuit — what he taught by mouth and by work together.
II. The Epistle: A Charge Given Under Oath
The Epistle opens not with advice but with an adjuration: Testificor coram Deo, et Iesu Christo, qui iudicaturus est vivos et mortuos — “I charge thee, before God and Jesus Christ, who shall judge the living and the dead.” St. Paul, awaiting death in Rome, binds Timothy by the Judgment itself. Then comes the command that might stand as the motto of Jerome’s life:
“Preach the word: be instant in season, out of season: reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine. For there shall be a time, when they will not endure sound doctrine; but, according to their own desires, they will heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears: and will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth, but will be turned unto fables.” (2 Tim. 4:2-4)
St. John Chrysostom, commenting on this passage in his ninth homily on the Second Epistle to Timothy, draws out the sense of opportune, importune: the preacher is not to wait for a convenient hour or a favourable audience, as though the word of God were a thing to be offered only when it will be welcomed. There is no season in which the soul does not need it; therefore there is no season in which the minister may be silent. And the “itching ears” of which the Apostle speaks are, in the Golden Mouth’s reading, the ears of those who seek not what will heal them but what will please them — who choose their teachers as one chooses entertainment.
No saint of the Latin Church lived this charge with more ferocity than Jerome. He was instant out of season against Helvidius, who denied the perpetual virginity of the Mother of God; against Jovinian, who levelled marriage and consecrated virginity and denied the value of fasting; against Vigilantius, who mocked the veneration of the martyrs’ relics; against the Origenists and, at the end of his life, against the Pelagians. He was not, by temperament, a gentle controversialist, and the Church has never pretended otherwise. But the Apostle’s command includes the word rebuke, and he obeyed it.
Then the Epistle turns from the charge to the one who gives it:
“For I am even now ready to be sacrificed: and the time of my dissolution is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. As to the rest, there is laid up for me a crown of justice, which the Lord the just judge will render to me in that day: and not only to me, but to them also that love his coming.” (2 Tim. 4:6-8)
Ego enim iam delibor. The Apostle’s word is liturgical: he is being poured out as a libation upon the altar. Chrysostom observes that St. Paul does not speak of his death as a defeat inflicted by Nero but as an offering he himself makes, the last act of a priestly life. The three perfect tenses — certavi, consummavi, servavi — are the verbs of a man looking back on work that is finished. And of the three, the Church on the feast of a Doctor hears the third most loudly: fidem servavi. The first duty of one who teaches is not originality. It is custody.
Here there is a small providence worth noting. The Latin in which the Church hears this Epistle today stands within the tradition of the Vulgate that bears Jerome’s name — though, in honesty, it must be said that scholars have long doubted whether the revision of the Pauline Epistles was his own work, as the revision of the Gospels certainly was. What is beyond doubt is that the Gospel of today’s Mass, like the whole Latin Old Testament from the Hebrew, reaches the altar through his hands. The Council of Trent, in its fourth session (1546), declared the Vulgate edition authentic in public readings, disputations, sermons and expositions. The man who kept the faith kept also the words in which the faith is proclaimed.
III. The Gospel: Salt, Light, and the Least of the Commandments
The Gospel is taken from the opening of the Sermon on the Mount, immediately after the Beatitudes. Our Lord has just told His disciples that they will be reviled and persecuted; He now tells them why the world will bother.
“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt lose its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is good for nothing any more but to be cast out, and to be trodden on by men. You are the light of the world. A city seated on a mountain cannot be hid.” (Matt. 5:13-14)
The primary interpretive claim of the Fathers on this passage is that the disciples — and above all those who teach in the Church — are given not for themselves but for the preservation of others, and that their corruption is therefore uniquely without remedy.
St. Jerome himself, in his Commentary on St. Matthew (CCSL 77), reads the salt as the apostolic teachers by whom the whole human race is seasoned, and he presses the Lord’s question with a teacher’s alarm: if the one appointed to correct others himself goes astray, by what other teacher is he to be corrected? The salt that seasons everything cannot itself be salted. There is no court above the Doctor’s own fidelity except God.
St. John Chrysostom (Homily 15 on St. Matthew) adds a note of realism. Salt, he observes, does not make the rotten fresh; it preserves what is sound from corrupting. The Apostles were not sent to a world already whole, but they were sent to keep whatever of it Christ had healed from falling back into decay. Their savour is for others, and so their losing it is a loss for others.
St. Augustine, in his exposition of the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount (De sermone Domini in monte I.6), follows the Latin word evanuerit — “if the salt become insipid” — and notes that in Latin the insipid is the fatuus, the fool. The salt that loses its savour is the disciple who, fearing the persecutions just foretold, grows foolish and trades the kingdom for temporal ease. It is then “trodden upon by men”: he becomes subject to the very men whose threats he fled. The city upon the mountain, in Augustine’s reading, is set upon the great mountain of justice which is the Sermon itself; and the bushel under which the lamp must not be hidden is the measure of temporal goods — the lamp is hidden whenever a man lets the fear of loss or the hope of gain dim his confession.
Then the Lord turns to the Law:
“Do not think that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For amen I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot, or one tittle shall not pass of the law, till all be fulfilled.” (Matt. 5:17-18)
Iota unum, aut unus apex. To no Father could this verse have spoken more directly than to Jerome, who spent thirty years among Hebrew consonants and Greek accents precisely because he believed that nothing in the inspired text was trivial. His life’s labour was a commentary on the jot and the tittle: if God did not despise the smallest stroke of His Law, the scholar may not despise it either. His famous principle, set down in the prologue to his Commentary on Isaiah, is that to be ignorant of the Scriptures is to be ignorant of Christ — for the Scriptures are the Law that Christ came not to destroy but to fulfil, and to neglect the text is to neglect the One the text reveals.
Finally, the verse that the Collect has already set before us:
“He therefore that shall break one of these least commandments, and shall so teach men, shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven. But he that shall do and teach, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt. 5:19)
The order matters: fecerit et docuerit. The doing comes first. St. Jerome wrote the same rule into his letter to the young priest Nepotian (Ep. 52), warning him that his deeds must not contradict his words, lest when he preaches in church someone silently answer him: why then do you not do what you say? The Collect of today’s Mass, asking that we practise what Jerome taught ore simul et opere, is nothing but the Church’s prayer that Matthew 5:19 be fulfilled in us as it was in him.
IV. Synthesis: The Word Sent Forth and Returning
The two readings of this Mass are joined by the pattern that St. Thomas places at the heart of all theology: every creature comes forth from God and returns to Him, exitus et reditus.
The Gospel is the exitus. The Word eternally spoken by the Father goes forth into the world; He sends His disciples out as salt and light; He commits the Law and the Prophets, fulfilled in Himself, to those who will do and teach. The Doctor of the Church stands in this going-forth: he receives the Word “in the midst of the Church,” as the Introit sings, and hands it on. St. Thomas says that it is a greater thing to give to others the fruits of contemplation than merely to contemplate, as it is a greater thing to illumine than merely to shine (cf. Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 188). The lamp is lit in order to be set on the candlestick.
The Epistle is the reditus. The same Word, having gone forth through the Apostle’s preaching, now draws the preacher himself home. Cursum consummavi: the course is a circle closing. The man who was sent now returns to the One who sent him, and brings with him the faith he was given, kept intact — fidem servavi. And what awaits him is not a wage invented for the occasion but a crown reposita, laid up already, rendered by the just Judge “in that day.”
Between the going-forth and the return lies the whole of the Doctor’s life, and the Collect names its single law: word and deed together. The salt that loses its savour is the teacher in whom the exitus has continued — the words still go out — while the reditus has been abandoned, because the life no longer goes back to God. Jerome’s greatness, and the reason the Church calls him maximus, is that the words he sent out into the whole Latin world were never severed from the life he was offering, in a cave at Bethlehem, to the God who had spoken them.
We should say plainly what the Church herself does not conceal: Jerome’s life was not free of fault. His letters show a sharp tongue, a long memory for injury, and a temper that wounded friends as well as heretics; his quarrel with Rufinus was bitter, and even St. Augustine felt its edge. A well-known later anecdote — pious tradition rather than history — has a pope, looking at a painting of the penitent Jerome striking his breast with a stone, remark that he did well to strike, for without that stone he would never have been raised to the altars. The story is apocryphal; its point is not. The Church canonizes heroic virtue, not impeccability, and in Jerome she honours a man who fought his own nature for fifty years in the desert of Chalcis and the cave of Bethlehem, and who did not let his faults become a reason to abandon either his penance or his work.
V. Devotional Application
The Gospel does not address scholars only. Our Lord says to every disciple, vos estis sal terræ. Every baptized soul is set somewhere as salt — in a family, a workplace, a parish — and the question of today’s Mass is whether the savour remains.
Examine. Take the verse of the Collect and apply it honestly: where do my words and my works part company? Where do I teach — my children, my colleagues, my friends — what I do not myself practise? And where have I grown fatuus, as Augustine says, softening the savour of the faith to avoid the reproach that Our Lord promised His disciples would come?
Read. Jerome’s counsel to every Christian he directed, lay and religious alike, was constant: take the Scriptures into your hands daily. Resolve today to a fixed, daily portion of Holy Scripture, however brief — a chapter of the Gospels in the Douay-Rheims, read slowly and on one’s knees if possible. Begin, fittingly, with the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7), from which today’s Gospel is drawn.
Keep. Fidem servavi. Choose one article of the faith that is today most often treated as optional — the perpetual virginity of Our Lady, the value of fasting, the honour due to the relics of the saints; Jerome defended all three — and learn to explain it clearly and charitably from Scripture and the Fathers. To keep the faith is also to be able to give an account of it.
Offer. Jerome’s scholarship was upheld by penance. Make one small, hidden mortification today, offered for all who teach the faith — priests, catechists, parents — that they may not lose their savour.
VI. The Collect
Deus, qui Ecclesiæ tuæ in exponendis sacris Scripturis beatum Hieronymum Confessorem tuum, Doctorem maximum providere dignatus es: præsta, quæsumus; ut, eius suffragantibus meritis, quod ore simul et opere docuit, te adiuvante, exercere valeamus. Per Dominum.
“O God, who didst vouchsafe to provide for Thy Church in blessed Jerome, Thy Confessor, a most great Doctor for the expounding of the Sacred Scriptures: grant, we beseech Thee, that, by the help of his merits, we may with Thy assistance practise what he taught by word and work alike. Through our Lord.”
VII. Aspiration
Revela oculos meos, et considerabo mirabilia de lege tua. “Open thou my eyes: and I will consider the wondrous things of thy law.” — Ps. 118:18
Said slowly each time the Scriptures are opened, this verse is the prayer of every true student of the sacred page, and the whole of Jerome’s life in a single line.
VIII. For Further Study
The Theology and Doctrine path takes up the questions this feast raises most directly: the inspiration and inerrancy of Holy Scripture, the authority of the Vulgate as defined at Trent, and Benedict XV’s encyclical Spiritus Paraclitus (1920), written for the fifteenth centenary of Jerome’s death, which remains the Church’s fullest magisterial meditation on his doctrine of Scripture.
The Lives of the Saints path continues with the companion life of St. Jerome — Stridon, Rome, the desert of Chalcis, the service of Pope Damasus, and the long years at Bethlehem with Paula and Eustochium.
The Church History path treats the controversies of his age — Origenism, the quarrel with Rufinus, the rise of Pelagianism — and the formation of the Latin Bible that shaped the whole of Christendom.
The Spiritual Practices path offers a structured method of daily lectio on the Scriptures, in the spirit of Jerome’s letters to those he directed.
Suggested devotion: the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary, lingering on the Nativity at Bethlehem, beside which Jerome chose to live and to die.
IX. Source Transparency
Scripture is quoted from the Douay-Rheims, with the Latin of the Vulgate. The patristic readings are given as faithful paraphrase with their locus — St. Jerome’s Commentary on St. Matthew and Letter 52, and the prologue to his Commentary on Isaiah; St. John Chrysostom’s Homilies on St. Matthew (15) and on the Second Epistle to Timothy (9); St. Augustine’s De sermone Domini in monte I.6 — rather than as direct quotation. St. Thomas is cited to the question. The anecdote of the pope and the stone is transmitted as pious tradition and is not presented as historical fact; the attribution of the Pauline portion of the Vulgate to Jerome is noted as doubtful in modern scholarship.
Sancte Hieronyme, Doctor maxime, ora pro nobis.