The Patron
Saint of Narks The Patron
Saint of Narks The Patron Saint of
Narks

The Patron Saint of Narks

In the Main Reception at Beaulieu, visitors will find a triannual education journal, something to browse through for a minute or two while they are waiting for the person coming to collect them.  There is a copy of the same journal - Networking: Catholic Education Today - in the secondary staffroom, where it usually sits looking pretty new and unthumbed! This term’s edition contains an article by our Head, Matthew Burke, linking Catholic Social Teaching with the urgency of feeding all school children and offering practical steps for educators to support food justice and advocacy.  My Friday Thought for this weekend is a much shorter, less academic (no footnotes) reworking of an article of my own that was published in the same journal - a piece about Saint Jerome, whose memory was celebrated on Tuesday this week.

A line I picked up from someone in the last 36 years (I am grateful to whichever spiritual director, lecturer, preacher, friend or colleague it was) says, “Don’t pass life’s little tests but fail life itself.” One of the important things that all (especially Catholic) educational institutions should try to do is help their members belong – community, communion, is essential to our humanity. We can and do, of course, belong to many circles: our biological families, our neighbourhoods, our schools, our friends and peers, our clubs and activities, our colleagues in the workplace, the places where we socialise.  In one of his most famous works, Saint Augustine of Hippo (about whom we have heard a lot since the election of the Augustinian Pope Leo XIV) reminds us that we are also citizens of Heaven - what he calls “the City of God”. We are members of “The Communion of Saints”.  In more prosaic terms, this means that we all belong to one another’s family because we all belong to God. One of the most precious instruments in the Church’s pedagogical toolbox, therefore, is this ragtag and glorious bunch known as the saints!  The Church’s wisdom places before us for our benefit these celestial siblings in Christ.  We cannot be them, so we are not meant to copy them, but we are meant to learn from them. They can orient us to live out our own struggles - by their intercession, of course, but also by helping us learn from the vicissitudes of their own struggles to love in this world. Many people might think that sainthood is something that could never apply to them, which is a bit worrying because there is only one alternative to being a saint!  Dorothy Day (whose own vicissitudes included being an atheist into her late 20s and having a termination earlier in that decade) was told by many people in her later life that she was a living saint.  She replied, however, that she did not want to be dismissed that easily!  She said that she would prefer it if her hangers-on helped the poor instead of offering her plaudits! The saints are put before us not merely to be admired on some unreachable pedestal. They are there to show us how to love more, how to become saints ourselves in the nitty-gritty of the ordinary and the messy.  So who was Saint Jerome?

The image at the beginning of this piece is a photograph I took myself in the Galleria Borghese in Rome four summers ago.  It is an image of Caravaggio’s San Girolamo, one of several works by the Italian, which has Jerome as its focus. Jerome was born in the Roman province of Dalmatia, covering what we would now call Bosnia and Croatia.  Like his old intellectual sparring partner (and already mentioned above), Augustine, Jerome lived and died as the sun was setting on the ancient empire.  Renowned for his mastery of ancient languages and his excellence in translation and biblical scholarship, Jerome was a priest who is now a Doctor of the Church (like Augustine himself). Jerome was a tad eccentric! He loved spending lots of his spare time and working hours in caves and ended his life living in a cave in Bethlehem. If we have worked in universities, schools or the Church down the years, we may have come across a few oddbods!  The infinite light of Christ can be refracted through various lenses – more than one type of personality and more than one way of life – to bring the sparkling colours of love into our world!  This is just one reason why we must never think sainthood is not for us!  God can use any of us, unconventional or more mainstream, to make the world a better place.  For those of us who work in education, it is important to remember that Jerome loved classical literary culture, constantly reading the great Greek and Roman authors.  He had also fallen in love with the Scriptures and their different literary devices.  Like Origen before him, he was sensitive to the different ways in which truth functions in literature, not all of them literal or historical, and he was also aware that literature can sometimes be manipulated by people with various agendas. He warned against the interpretation of texts to wield power over others.  While a devout Christian, throughout his life Jerome tried to hold together pagan, Jewish and Christian texts, believing that pagan and sacred literature shed light on each other and on our search for truth in life. He also lived in Rome for a while as a secretary to the Pope and it was during this period that he became a spiritual guide to the Eternal City’s women and men who, in the face of the cataclysmic world events going on around them, wanted to use the Scriptures to help them make sense of things.

I have said that Jerome was a bit odd.  A look at his surviving letters (there are over 120) reveals that he was also feisty and did not suffer fools gladly. In correspondence, he referred to Augustine as a “Numidian ant!” I suspect Jerome was not the sort of person with whom you’d choose to sit down for a pint!  31 years ago, while I was working in Kirkby, a wise and much-loved Liverpool priest called John Seddon (God rest him) told me that every place has “the parish nark” – the person who always moans about something.  I soon discovered that there is usually more than one in every parish and workplace (ditto in families and every sort of human community)!  Was Jerome a bit of a nark, awkward and confrontational, because of his giftedness?  Are virtues and vices sometimes two sides of the same coin?  Academic or professional pride and ambition might deflect many a person from the path of sainthood, but might it not be argued that we nevertheless occasionally need a bit of Jerome’s tenacity and forthrightness to stand up and be counted when people talk manifest nonsense?  Even if it is always preferable to do it with a smile on our face, intending to help rather than foment division, and with the realisation that our life is meant to be a gift poured out for others and not a stage on which to make it all about us and show how clever we are.

Jerome might be seen as a great patron for teachers and learners (hopefully we - parents, professional educators, managers, anyone with responsibility for others - are all a bit of both), for all who seek greater understanding of the mystery of life, and for all who seek to help the seekers.  All educators need to cultivate Jerome’s commitment to literacy, a nuanced and intelligent understanding of the Bible and general academic excellence. He is also a source of encouragement to eccentrics and those who cannot disagree with others without sulking or having a slanging match!  Saint Jerome, patron saint of narks and nutters (inside and outside the Church), pray for us all, that whatever little tests we pass, we don’t end up failing life!