"Moral Theology From a Desert Crank" St. Jerome for Today

St. Jerome’s Moral Theology for Today 

By: Terry Hursh, M.Div. J.D.

St. Jerome tends to enter the modern imagination as a caricature, not unlike St. John the Baptist. He’s been reviewed as a desert crank, a polemicist with a quill dipped in acid, a saint whose sanctity seems almost accidental. But,  behind his sometimes unrestrained and barbed letters that are extant and his legendary temper lies a deeply human struggle with holiness.

This speaks, perhaps surprisingly, to contemporary Catholic moral life. Jerome’s moral theology is not a system. He doesn’t present us with a “how to” guide to Holiness. But rather his life is a of a soul wrestling with God, Scripture, desire, community, and the uncompromising demands of conscience.

Legend has it that while in the desert, he encountered a lion with a thorn in his paw. He removed the thorn and the lion became a companion. In Jerome’s drama, we can hear more than the roar of the lion beside him. We can hear the uneasy conscience of a man trying, with imperfect intensity, to be faithful.

Jerome’s moral vision begins in the desert—literal, yes, but equally the internal landscape where distractions become temptations and temptations become opportunities for grace. In the recollections of his early ascetic years, we discover no triumphalism, but rather candor about the tensions between memory, imagination, and will. Desire, for him, was not something to be shamed or suppressed; it was something to be understood, disciplined, and directed.

There is something refreshingly unromantic about this. Jerome does not idealize the moral life. He takes seriously how hard it is, and how much the mind resists conversion. In a culture that often prefers effortless spirituality, like today,  his honesty feels almost pastoral—if bra

One much quoted observation of Jerome’s—“Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ”—is often found in today’s catechetical teachings. But in Jerome’s mind, this wasn’t mere piety. It was the heart of his moral theology.

Scripture, with all its difficulty, complexity, and historical texture, forms the soul not just by giving laws but by offering us stories—stories that shape desire, sharpen conscience, and place the individual within a larger moral horizon.  Even though Jerome is recognized as the patron saint of scholars, and a doctor of the Church, biblical literacy is not an intellectual pastime rather it is a moral necessity. Jerome stressed that without grounding in the Biblical text,  risks grounding moral life in sentiment, instinct, or cultural fashion.

This insistence feels particularly relevant today, when Catholic moral discourse often fractures along political or ideological lines. Jerome’s message is a reminder: the Church’s moral imagination is born not from argument but from narrative—God’s narrative.

Jerome’s letters to the Roman women Paula and Eustochium, whom he considered “daughters in the Faith,” can be viewed as relics of an austere, even oppressive, spirituality. And, to be sure, he often strains modern ears. Yet beneath the ascetical rigor lies a deeper theological conviction: freedom comes through detachment.

Jerome isn’t proposing an escape from the world so much as a reorientation within it. His asceticism is an attempt to free the heart from compulsions—whether sensual, social, or economic, the same pressures that cloud moral clarity in our time. Today, when the burdens of consumer culture, digital overload, and political polarization weigh heavily on the conscience, Jerome’s instinct feels surprisingly applicable: moral freedom requires intentional limits.

Jerome’s notorious conflicts—with bishops, scholars, former friends—can make him seem like an ancient internet commenter. But there is another side to his confrontational style: a belief that genuine friendship requires truth-telling. In his view, moral life is communal, and communities must be courageous and transparent enough to correct and admonish one another.

While Jerome’s own practice often faltered ( humility was not his strong suit)  his conviction is still worth contemplating: charity without truth becomes sentimentality, and truth without charity becomes cruelty. The Church’s synodal moment today similarly asks: How do we speak honestly without fracturing community? Jerome’s life is both a warning and an invitation.

In the end, what saves Jerome from becoming simply the patron saint of severity is a demonstrable self-awareness visible in his late letters. He knew he was flawed. He knew he was difficult. And he knew that, despite all his striving, salvation was not something he could engineer through discipline alone.

This is the note of grace in Jerome’s moral theology: an acknowledgment that the Christian life is lived within human limitation. Holiness is not performance; it is participation in God’s mercy.

In an era when Catholic moral debates often revolve around perfection—personal, institutional, or ideological—Jerome reminds us that the saints themselves were works in progress.

Jerome does not offer a blueprint for moral theology, and he certainly doesn’t offer a gentle model of holiness. But he does offer something we may need: a moral seriousness that avoids despair, a willingness to wrestle with desire, a commitment to Scripture’s formative power, and an honesty about human complexity. He was not a serene saint. He was a searching one. And perhaps that is precisely why he remains compelling.