You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints.

This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute,

an Apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.

Hi, and welcome to Catholic Saints.

I am Taylor Kemp, the director of Formed, and with me is Dr. Ben Acres, our chief content officer. Thanks for having me. It is a joy to be talking about a saint today. Today we are talking about Saint Jerome. Who is St. Jerome? St. Jerome is one of my favorite saints. Okay. It's a great place to start. I have lots of saints that are my friends.

I hope they count me as their friend.

I'm sure they do. I hope so. They're charitable. Because they're charitable. Yeah, right, because they're full of charity. They wouldn't choose. That's right. Holiness is the perfection of charity. That's the definition given in the Second Vatican Council. There we go. So, St. Jerome has been perfected in charity.

He's a saint.

So he would be my friend.

He is your friend.

He is my friend.

He is alive.

Yes. council. There we go. So St. Jerome has been perfected in charity. He's a thing. So he would be my

friend. He is your friend. He is my friend. He is alive. Yes. So he's actually a early church,

father of the church. He's a doctor of the church. He's considered actually one of the great

Western doctors. Okay. This is how influential he is. I'll give you his dates. He is born

somewhere between 342 and 347, and then he dies in 420. He dies on September 30th, 420.

Great. So his feast day is on... It's on September 30th. It's actually his death day. So in the Catholic tradition, we celebrate that as the D.S. Natalis, the day of birth. not the birthday, but the birthday into eternal life. Wonderful. So we celebrate that with him. Okay. What else do we know about him? We actually know a lot about Jerome because he's very prolific writer, maybe second, definitely second to Augustine. Augustine's the most prolific, but he's up there with Augustine. He actually even knew Augustine. They correspond their dates overlap. They corresponded with one another. He's actually born in modern-day Croatia on the Dalmatian coast, and his full name is Eusebius, Sofrinus, Hieronymus. Wouldn't have expected Jerome to come out of that. So you know what, Jerome comes from the Latin Hieronymus, which is Hiro-Holynomos name. Holy name. So his name means holy name. All right. Yeah. So St. Holy Name, Jerome today, is incredibly intelligent. And it's recognized by his family, his village. And so he goes to Rome to study grammar and rhetoric. Okay. So he's not a Christian at this time. Similar to Augustine there too, studied rhetoric.

Exactly, very well educated and very gifted intellectually.

So he goes to Rome, learns Latin, learns Greek, learns the classic literature of the Greek poets and the Latin writers and poets as well.

And he, in Rome, has a deep, has a conversion to the Christian faith.

So he wants to convert to the Christian faith.

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