Today being a Sunday (the twenty-sixth in Ordinary Time), the memorial of St. Jerome is omitted this year, which is a shame. I have a devotion to St. Jerome, even though he's the father Protestants tend to trot out when they're trying to deny the difference between bishops and priests or disparage the Septuagint canon.He was a holy monk, an accomplished Hebraist and translator, a revered spiritual guide and collector of traditions, a great defender of the perpetual virginity of our Lady, and the possessor of a bad temper and a vitriolic tongue, which I find comforting now and again. But lately, and especially in this wretched election year, it is his lament for the Roman Empire that comes to my mind:
Oh wretched Empire! Mayence, formerly so noble a city, has been taken and ruined, and in the church many thousands of men have been massacred. Worms has been destroyed after a long siege. Rheims, that powerful city, Amiens, Arras, Speyer, Strasburg—all have seen their citizens led away captive into Germany. Aquitaine and the provinces of Lyons and Narbonne, all save a few towns, have been depopulated; and these the sword threatens without, while hunger ravages within.I cannot speak without tears of Toulouse, which the merits of the holy Bishop Exuperius have prevailed so far to save from destruction. Spain, even, is in daily terror lest it perish, remembering the invasion of the Cimbri; and whatsoever the other provinces have suffered once, they continue to suffer in their fear.I will keep silence concerning the rest, lest I seem to despair of the mercy of God. For a long time, from the Black Sea to the Julian Alps, those things which are ours have not been ours; and for thirty years, since the Danube boundary was broken, war has been waged in the very midst of the Roman Empire. Our tears are dried by old age. Except a few old men, all were born in captivity and siege, and do not desire the liberty they never knew.Who could believe this? How could the whole tale be worthily told? How Rome has fought within her own bosom not for glory, but for preservation—nay, how she has not even fought, but with gold and all her precious things has ransomed her life...Who could believe that Rome, built upon the conquest of the whole world, would fall to the ground? That the mother herself would become the tomb of her peoples? That all the regions of the East, of Africa and Egypt, once ruled by the queenly city, would be filled with troops of slaves and handmaidens? That to-day holy Bethlehem should shelter men and women of noble birth, who once abounded in wealth and are now beggars? "The Fall of Rome" EyeWitness to History, www.eyewitnesstohistory.com (2007).
Posts
