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September 30 across 2,026 years of Catholic history

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event · BETHLEHEM, Palestine, September 30, 420 AD

St. Jerome, who put the Bible into Latin, dies at Bethlehem

He was old, poor and losing his sight, and a year of illness had stopped his last book, a commentary on the prophet Jeremiah, at chapter 32.

An oil painting of a very old, bald, white-bearded man in a brown wool tunic and cloak writing with a reed pen at a plain wooden table in a stone cell, lit by a small oil lamp, while a young veiled woman holding a clay bowl waits in an arched doorway that opens onto a rocky hillside at night.
St. Jerome writes his commentary on Jeremiah in his cell at Bethlehem, about 420 AD. The younger Paula, his nurse in his last illness, waits at the door.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of Baroque oil painting, from the paper's reference portrait based on Saint Jerome Writing (Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, c. 1605-1606, Galleria Borghese, Rome) View source artwork.

Saint Jerome, the priest who translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew and revised the Latin Gospels, died of a fever at Bethlehem on September 30, 420 AD. He had lived there for thirty-four years, and a long last illness had stopped his commentary on the prophet Jeremiah at chapter 32. Two women nursed him through that illness: the younger Paula, granddaughter of his friend St. Paula, and Melania.

6 min read

A painting in an early Italian style: a tonsured, bearded friar in a patched grey-brown habit kneels on a stony path with his hands joined, looking back at a rocky peak crowned by small stone buildings, while a friar holding a saddled brown horse and five other barefoot friars stand behind him.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of the Assisi frescoes of Cimabue and Giotto, from the paper's reference portrait based on Legend of St. Francis, scene 19: Stigmatization of St. Francis (Giotto di Bondone, 1297–1300 AD, Upper Church, Basilica of San Francesco, Assisi) View source artwork.

event · MOUNT LA VERNA, Tuscany, September 30, 1224 AD

St. Francis kneels on the mountain path to say goodbye to La Verna

Saint Francis of Assisi left Mount La Verna on September 30, 1224 AD, at the end of a forty days' fast, too weak to walk. He came down with the wounds of Christ in his hands, feet and side, and he hid them from almost everyone. Where the path last showed the mountain, he knelt and told it they would never see each other again.

4 min read

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A framed manuscript-style miniature of a pale brick city wall with square crenellated towers, broken open in the middle, where a battering ram lies in a spill of rubble and two soldiers with round shields stand in the gap while four mounted spearmen wait in the foreground beside a reed-edged stream.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of manuscript illumination, staged after The Procession of St. Gregory, Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, fol. 71v (the Limbourg brothers, 1411-1416 AD, Musee Conde, Chantilly) View source artwork.

King Agilulf's Lombards took Cremona and Mantua this summer, and the emperor's governor at Ravenna agreed a truce that let them keep both, until April 1, 605 AD. Saint Gregory the Great, pope for thirteen years and now kept in bed by gout, worked for the peace through the Catholic Lombard queen, Theodelinda. He died in March 604 AD with the truce still running.

4 min read

A hand-coloured woodcut-style picture of a young girl with long fair hair, in a long green gown, kneeling in profile with joined hands before a small wooden crucifix on the plank wall of a timber bedroom, with a bed, a candle on a stool and a shut plank door.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of a hand-coloured woodcut, from the paper's reference portrait based on Birgitta som pilgrim, wall painting in Harg church, Uppland (unknown Uppland church painter, late 15th century AD, Harg church, Uppland, Sweden) View source artwork.

Saint Bridget of Sweden, whose father governed and judged the province of Uppland, heard a sermon on the Passion when she was ten. That night, according to longstanding Catholic Tradition, she saw Christ crucified. Two years later her aunt found her out of bed at night praising him, and St. Bridget told her aunt it was the crucified Lord she had seen.

A painting in an arched lunette: three shepherds in rough tunics, one of them a crouching boy, peer through a thicket at a young man in a shaggy garment of skins who sits at the mouth of a cave in a limestone cliff, with sheep and goats behind them and a river gorge falling away below.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of Italian buon fresco on lime plaster, from the paper's reference portrait based on Come Romano monaco da lo abito eremitico a Benedetto (Life of St Benedict, Scene 4: The Monk Romanus Dresses Benedict) (Il Sodoma (Giovanni Antonio Bazzi), 1505-1508 AD, Great cloister, Abbazia di Monte Oliveto Maggiore, Asciano, Siena) View source artwork.

Shepherds on the hills above Subiaco glimpsed a man dressed in skins through the bushes and took him for an animal. It was Saint Benedict of Nursia, who had lived hidden in a cave for three years. Pope St. Gregory the Great tells how many of the shepherds were converted and how, from then on, people brought the hermit food and carried away his words.

4 min read

Today in the Church

Saint Jerome, Priest and Doctor of the Church

  • Saint Jerome, priest and doctor of the ChurchMemorial

Saint of the day

Saint Jerome

Saint Jerome, priest and Doctor of the Church, was born at Stridon, served Pope St. Damasus I at Rome and spent his last thirty-four years at Bethlehem translating the Scriptures into Latin. He died there in 420 AD.

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On this day in the Church

  • 1821 St. John Henry Newman, twenty years old, was called downstairs after Sunday dinner to say whether it was a sin to write a letter on a Sunday, and a painful family quarrel followed that he blamed himself for in his journal.Our reportSource
  • 1897 St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus died in the infirmary of the Carmel of Lisieux at about twenty past seven in the evening, aged twenty-four, looking at her crucifix and saying "My God, I love Thee."Our reportSource
  • 2020 Pope Francis marked 1,600 years since the death of St. Jerome with the apostolic letter Scripturae Sacrae affectus, given at the Basilica of Saint John Lateran.Source

Quote of the day

“Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.”
— St. Jerome, Quoted by Pope Benedict XVI, General Audience on Saint Jerome, November 7, 2007