{"id":90388,"date":"2026-09-30T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-30T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bloomministries.org\/faith\/?p=90388"},"modified":"2026-09-30T07:05:16","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T14:05:16","slug":"his-life-and-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bloomministries.org\/faith\/his-life-and-works\/","title":{"rendered":"Daily Offering: September 30, 2026 | His Life and Works"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Opening Address<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Welcome to Bloom’s Daily Offering for Wednesday, September 30, 2026. Today is the feast of St. Jerome, Confessor and Doctor of the Church, third class, and the vestments are white. There is no commemoration. The Church gives him the Mass she gives every Doctor, which this ministry has now read eight times, and she gives him three prayers of his own that have never been said here, all of them about his life and works. One of them asks that we be able to put into practice what he taught us by his life and works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wherever you are, you are welcome here. If you came into this Wednesday fairly sure that you are not a credit to anything, stay, because the man on the calendar today was difficult company and the Church did not wait for him to improve before she called his life and works a teaching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The prayer does not ask us to admire him. It asks that we be able to practise what came out of his life and works. That is a smaller request, and a stranger one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three prayers are new this morning and everything else is old, which sounds like a thin Wednesday and is not. The old texts have all been here before, some of them many times over. The prayer about his life and works has not been opened once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Word on Today’s Propers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Nearly everything sung at this Mass has stood in this archive before. Today is the ninth outing of the Introit In medio Ecclesi\u00e6<\/em>, the eighth of this Gospel, the seventh of this Epistle and the fifth of this Gradual. The same texts carried St. Albert the Great<\/a>, St. John of the Cross<\/a>, St. Laurence of Brindisi<\/a> and St. Augustine<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the citations stand where the propers would, with the readings linked to their chapters, and two prayers are printed in full. Reprinting an eighth copy of the same Gospel would add length and nothing else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is new today is small. Three orations belong to Jerome alone and have never been prayed here: his Collect, his Secret, and the prayer after Communion. The Collect is the one with a verb in it. The Latin is exerc\u00e9re vale\u00e1mus<\/em>\u2014that we may be able to exercise it, from the verb we get exercise<\/em> from\u2014and what it asks us to exercise is what he taught by his life and works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A ninth reading of the same Introit is not a poorer morning than a first. It only means the argument has to come from the man, and from a Collect making an unusual claim about him\u2014that his life and works taught something we are meant to be able to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Introit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Eccli 15:5; Ps 91:2<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the midst of the assembly he opened his mouth<\/a>, with its psalm verse, carried here on St. Albert the Great<\/a> and seven times since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Collect<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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O God, Who graciously gave Thy Church blessed Jerome, Thy Confessor and peerless teacher, to explain the Holy Scriptures: grant, we beseech Thee, that with the help of his merits and by Thine assistance we may be able to put into practice what he has taught us by his life and works. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Epistle<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

2 Timothy 4:1-8<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paul’s charge to Timothy to preach in season and out of season, and his own account of a finished course, carried here on St. Albert the Great<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gradual<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Ps 36:30-31; Eccli 45:9<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mouth of the just shall meditate wisdom<\/a>, with its Alleluia verse on the robe of glory, carried here on St. Bernard<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gospel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Matthew 5:13-19<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Salt, light, the city on the hill and the least of the commandments, carried here on St. Bonaventure<\/a> and again on St. Augustine<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Offering<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The prayer does not ask for his temper<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The Collect asks for very little. Not that we become learned, not his languages or his library or his stamina, and not that we reproduce his life and works. It asks that we be able to put into practice what he taught by his life and works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is a modest request with a sharp edge, because Jerome’s life is on record and it was not smooth. The Catholic Encyclopedia, which is not in the business of running him down, calls him in turn exquisitely dainty and bitterly satirical, and says his harsh criticisms made him bitter enemies who tried to ruin him. It faults his imprudence of language. His own century found him hard going.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the Church has a problem on this feast, and she solves it inside the prayer’s grammar rather than by tidying the man. The prayer skips copying his life and works altogether and asks instead that we practise what he taught by his life and works, which leaves open the possibility that a life can hand on something its owner never managed to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If that sounds like special pleading for a saint, put it in ordinary terms and see whether it still holds. You have almost certainly learned something real from somebody you would not want to share a house with, and the thing you learned did not stop being true when they were unpleasant at dinner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The record is not thin, either. He reached Bethlehem in 386 and settled in a monastery beside a convent founded by two Roman women, Paula and Eustochium, who had followed him to Palestine. He stayed until he died there in 420, writing commentaries through his last fourteen years and troubled throughout by controversies with Rufinus and the Pelagians. Thirty-four years of study, austerity and argument.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is his life and works as the Church’s own reference work has them, and the quarrels are not a footnote to it. They sit in the record beside the books. The prayer reaches straight past them for whatever his life and works actually taught, on the assumption that there is something there worth taking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What he taught by his life and works<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A teaching runs inside churches and well outside them: a person has to be palatable before their work is allowed to count. If someone is angry, awkward, inconsistent or hard to be around, whatever they are telling you can be set aside on those grounds alone, without anyone having to examine it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That teaching has been run, and it grew rooms in which the composed complainant was believed and the furious one was handled. It grew institutions fluent in dismissing an account by describing the person giving it, and a habit of calling the discomfort of the listener a finding about the speaker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The quieter cost comes earlier. A standard that grades delivery does not only reject accounts once they are given; it stops them being given at all, because people who know they will be heard badly decide in advance to say nothing. The room never learns what it refused. Nothing in Jerome’s life and works suggests a Church can afford to run that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People who have survived sexual assault carry that teaching in a specific and well-documented form: their credibility is attacked through their manner far more reliably than through the facts. Too angry, too flat, too slow to report, too inconsistent in the retelling. Set that beside a Church keeping the feast of a man her own reference works call bitterly satirical, and still asking that we practise what he taught by his life and works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She did not require him to be agreeable first. The temper is in the record, his life and works stand anyway, and that order\u2014substance first, manner second\u2014is the reverse of the order most rooms actually run.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two mornings running are near the same ground, and the ground is not the same. Yesterday<\/a> the question was what a person in authority does to somebody small, and where the weight of that sentence lands. Today’s question is narrower and it points the other way: what we do with a teacher’s own manner when we are deciding whether to listen. That is a different claim, and it does not reach back into the first one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of this makes difficulty a qualification. Being hard to deal with is not evidence of being right, and a gentle person’s account is not weakened by the gentleness. Nobody is more truthful for being angrier. The claim only runs one way: manner is not admissible as a reason to refuse to look at the substance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The word works<\/em> is dangerous in a room like this. The prayer is not scoring output. It does not say a life counts in proportion to what it produced, and if it did it would be saying something unbearable to everyone whose body or circumstances cap what a day can hold. It is asking about deeds, not about volume. His life and works means the whole of a man\u2014the teaching, the temper, the hours\u2014never a tally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He admitted the book was hard<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

There is something else in the record that I find harder to get past than the temper. Writing on his commentaries, the encyclopedia says he does not try to cloak over his ignorance, that he admits there are many difficulties in the Bible, and that at times he seems quite embarrassed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

God gave him to the Church to explain the Holy Scriptures; the prayer calls him her peerless teacher; and the man so titled is on the record as stuck. Not privately stuck, either. Stuck in the commentaries, in the books, where anyone could read it, and he left it in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most teaching we receive has been through a process that removes exactly that. The lesson arrives finished. Nobody shows you the afternoon they could not make the passage work, and the effect on the person receiving it is to make understanding look like a trait some people have and you do not. His life and works went out the other way, with the difficulties still in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A harder version sits further down his record. For years he held the Greek Septuagint to be inspired; then, the encyclopedia says, the progress of his Hebrew studies and his dealings with the rabbis made him give up that idea and recognise only the original text as inspired. He reversed himself in public, in writing, on the largest question in his own field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same article then faults him for it\u2014that he went too far in reacting against the ideas of his time, and is open to reproach for not having sufficiently appreciated the Septuagint. So the reversal is on the record, and so is the charge that he overcorrected, and both were left in. His life and works come to us with the revision and the criticism of the revision still attached.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would rather have that than a clean account. A teacher who has never publicly changed his mind has either never been wrong or has never said so, and only one of those is available to a human being. What his life and works hand over here is permission: to have held a position, to have dropped it, and to go on teaching afterwards without pretending the earlier years did not happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think that is why the prayer says practise<\/em> and not believe<\/em> or master<\/em>. A thing you practise is a thing you are allowed to be bad at on a given morning, and his life and works are offered to us in exactly that form. You can be mid-sentence and stuck in it without having failed at it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you are not religious, this translates with nothing left over. The most useful people you have learned from were the ones who would say out loud that they did not know, and the culture of pretending otherwise has cost more in wasted years than any amount of ignorance ever did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Somebody else took the notes<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Roughly a hundred of Jerome’s homilies survive, and not one in his own hand. The encyclopedia says plainly that they are notes taken down by his hearers, and that it is a question whether he ever reviewed them. The preaching we have from the Church’s greatest teacher of Scripture is other people’s handwriting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The part of his life and works that reaches us most directly is the part he did not control, did not polish and may never have read. He talked in a room. Somebody wrote it down. It outlived him by sixteen centuries, and he had no say in which parts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About a hundred and twenty of his letters survive as well, and many of those he did write for publication, so he shaped some of the record deliberately. The homilies are the other kind entirely. His life and works reach us as a mixture of what he curated and what simply escaped him, and it is the escaped half that people are still reading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That should be a relief to anyone who has been taught to think of a life’s meaning as something they are supposed to be assembling. Most of what you hand on will be like this. It will be the sentence you said without weighing it, the evening you turned up when you did not feel like it, the thing somebody else remembered and you forgot. That is what his life and works were made of too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a story sometimes told of a man who ran a Wednesday evening scripture group in a parish hall\u2014folding tables in a rough circle, a tea urn that took twenty minutes, rain on the high windows most of that autumn. He had done it for years and he was good at it. Then one October he found he could no longer honestly say he believed the thing he had just finished explaining.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He did not resign and he did not fake it. He kept turning up, and on the first Wednesday after it happened he said out loud, in front of eleven people, that he did not know. He has said since that he expected the room to empty by half past eight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It did not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two others said the same thing the following week, the group got slower and a great deal more honest, and it is still running. He will tell you he taught better in the years he was unsure than in the years he was certain, and that he has never worked out what to do with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is Jerome in miniature, and it is why his life and works are in front of us this morning rather than another scholar’s. Nothing in the parish man’s life and works that autumn came out of confidence. It came out of turning up to a cold hall on a wet night and doing the next hour honestly, which is the exact size of the thing this Collect calls practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Practise it on a Wednesday evening<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

So take the prayer at its word and make it small. It asks that you be able to work, this week, the thing his life and works taught, which has nothing to do with being a Doctor of the Church. The two portable pieces are already in front of us: say plainly what you do not know, and keep turning up anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both of those are available today to a person with no education, no platform and very little energy. Neither requires you to be pleasant, and neither requires you to be certain. They are the two things Jerome managed without ever managing to be agreeable, and they are all his life and works ask of you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Collect asks that we<\/em> be able to practise, not one person at a time, which puts the two small tasks inside a body rather than on somebody’s individual shoulders. A room where one person has already said they do not know is a room where the next person can. That is how his life and works actually get practised\u2014corporately, and usually because somebody went first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you do not believe in God, none of this needs the theology to work. Admit ignorance out loud and keep your commitments, and you will be more use to the people around you than almost any amount of confidence would make you. That is the whole content of his life and works translated into a language that asks nothing of you in the way of faith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The last of it comes from the Collect’s own opening, which asks for help before it asks for anything from us\u2014with the help of his merits and by Thine assistance<\/em>. Even the practising is not something you are expected to generate on your own. His life and works arrive as something handed over, and the only question this morning is whether you will pick up the two portable pieces of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And if this week gives you neither the honesty nor the turning up, the prayer has already allowed for it. It asks that we be made able<\/em>, which is a request about capacity rather than a summons to produce. His life and works are not being held over you as a standard you are currently failing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Secret<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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By Thy heavenly gifts, grant us, O Lord, we beseech Thee, to serve Thee with a free mind: that the offerings we present may, by the intercession of blessed Jerome, Thy Confessor, work in us both healing and glory. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The Holding<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

May God give you a free mind this Wednesday, and the strength to practise the two plain things his life and works still teach\u2014to say what you do not know, and to come back next week regardless. You are not required to be agreeable, finished or sure. May Almighty God bless you, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And if that language is not yours, take it plainly. Say out loud the thing you have been pretending to understand, keep the commitment you made to somebody who is expecting you, and stop treating your own uncertainty as a disqualification. None of it depends on how you feel about any of this by Friday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frequently Asked Questions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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