Music Monday: He wasn’t a plaster sort of a saint…

St. Jerome was the Early Church Father who produced the Latin Vulgate bible. In honour of this great Bible scholar, today’s “Music Monday” is the song “The Thunderer” by Dion:

God’s angry man,
His crotchety scholar
Was Saint Jerome,
The great name-caller
Who cared not a dime
For the laws of Libel
And in his spare time
Translated the Bible.

Quick to disparage
All joys but learning
Jerome thought marriage
Better than burning;
But didn’t like woman’s
Painted cheeks;
Didn’t like Romans,
Didn’t like Greeks

Hated Pagans
For their Pagan ways,
Yet doted on Cicero all of his days.
A born reformer, cross and gifted,
He scolded mankind
Sterner than Swift did;

But he swelled men’s minds
With a Christian leaven.
It takes all kinds
To make a heaven.

Worked to save
The world from the heathen;
Fled to a cave
For peace to breathe in,
Promptly wherewith
For miles around
He filled the air with
Fury and sound.

In a mighty prose
For Almighty ends,
He thrust at his foes,
Quarreled with his friends,
And served his Master,
Though with complaint.
He wasn’t a plaster sort of a saint.

Story Time!

While I was in Washington DC for the March For Life last year, I was invited to a party. Honestly, this English accent of mine gets me in everywhere… 🙂

Anyway, each guest was asked to come prepared with a relatively unknown Saint story to share with the everyone else. Clearly this party was organized by my kind of Catholic nerd! Naturally, I told the story of this blog’s patron, St. Drogo.

However, I also came prepared with another story, not about a Saint, but about a Saint’s brother. Since it was recently the ordination anniversary of my former Pastor, Fr. Robert, I thought it would be appropriate to share that story today.

Jerome

Many of you might have heard of St Jerome. He was a great biblical scholar of the Early Church and he was the one who produced the Vulgate, the official translation into Latin of the original Biblical texts. This story is about Jerome’s younger brother Paulinian, sometimes known as Paulinanus.

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