The feast of Saint Jerome is always a special day for me. Perhaps it is because he was such an unsaintly saint. It’s tough to read much of his writings because of his cantankerous personality, but there have truly been few more brilliant men that have populated the planet. Of course, he’s appreciated most for his work in translating the Scriptures into a single book that could be read by any literate person in the Western world (and understood by all). It’s astonishing, given the frenetic pace of publication of vernacular translations of the Bible over the past 100 years, that Jerome’s Vulgate translation effectively served as the official (de jure, or mostly de facto) version of the Scriptures for roughly 1,500 years. What a great gift this guy was to the Church – and how strangely inspirational to see politeness not overly regarded in the search for truth!