St Jerome: Celebrating an abandoned saint
St Jerome by Caravaggio Today the Church celebrates one of the great saints of the Church, Jerome*. I say the Church, the Catholic Church marks this day with due dignity (the prayers and antiphons, the sentences that precede the Benedictus and Magnificat, are all proper to his commemoration). but for some reason the most recent Anglican Lectionary leaves him with the very least of commemorations, a mention of his name in the calendar, but nothing more. Even the Book of Common Prayer affords this saint a Colleca Jerome is a name we don't often remember, but it is he who gave the Chutch the Bible in the vernacular, in the language of the people, as it is he who translated it into Latin, producing what we know today as the Vulgate translation. (It is called the Vulgate becaus it was translated into the common, vulgar language of the people of the time.) Divines such as Coverdale and Launcelot Andrewes, who translated the Bible into English owe St Jerome a debt of gratitude for...