Gary Michuta's Defense of the Indefensible

Thanks guys, appreciate you taking my call. Sure. Okay, my question is about St.

Jerome, and I know you had kind of mentioned him before a little bit, and I've heard that he was, some people claim him to be kind of a rogue and that he got shunned away from Rome, and that he actually kind of believed in the

Protestant notion that the Deuterocanonical books were not inspired and shouldn't be in the Bible.

Is that true? There is truth to that, yes. First of all, the reason that he gives for leaving Rome was that he could not get the dancing girls out of his mind, and he said that Rome was so wicked that he was tempted to, these things would be going through his mind instead of the scriptures and prayer, and in order to try and get all the images of the dancing girls out of his mind, he moved out to the deserts of Bethlehem, where he said they continued to haunt him.

So, you know, the saints are a lot like us, in many ways. But he went out there for the austerity of it, and to translate the

Bible from the Hebrew and the Greek into the Latin. And yes, he tended to go to the point of not accepting the

Deuterocanonicals as part of the canon of scripture. He was an exception, by the way. He stood out from all the other fathers.

He was an exception. He was an exception. He was an exception.