Everything you said was true, but how was what I wrote inaccurate? St. Jerome was ordered to translate the Bible for Pope Damasus no?
I knew what you had meant, but the way you phrased it,
St. Jerome created the Bible in the order and form we know them.
reminded me of a Protestant who claimed that the Church's version of the Sacred Scriptures came from Saint Jerome as its ultimate compiler and creator. It is incorrect to say such a thing because the Sacred Scriptures come from God by the divine inspiration whereby the Prophets, Apostles, Evangelists, &c., wrote the various Books of Holy Writ, and the Roman Church alone determines by infallible magisterium which Books were divinely inspired and therefore to be included in the Canon of Sacred Scripture, and which ones were not divinely inspired and therefore apocryphal.
The error of the Protestant heretics lies essentially in their denial of the dogma that Christ established One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church in order to preach the Gospel, and continue His work upon the earth of glorifying our Heavenly Father and saving souls.
Preach as in
speaking not
writing. For St. Paul wrote to the Romans, "Faith then cometh by hearing; and hearing by the word of Christ" (Rom. ch. x., 17).
If the Sacred Scriptures alone were to be the sole authority for the faithful, then it seem as if the heretics would believe Our Lord to have committed a gross act of negligence in failing to write the Gospel Himself. The fact that He wrote nothing during His public ministry but taught by word should make it obvious that Our Lord had other intentions: i.e., to have His Apostles and their successors write the Books of the New Testament and sanction the Canon of the Old Testament by the authority which He Himself gave them.
Also, Our Lord lived 33 years upon the earth, and only three of those years did he devote to preaching and teaching publicly. Shouldn't that indicate to the Protestants that Our Lord became Incarnate not for the sole sake of having some written words become the norm of our lives? Shouldn't that indicate to everyone that Our Lord's primary purposes in the redemptive Incarnation were to satisfy the justice of the Heavenly Father outraged by sin and to satisfy His love for mankind by redeeming them and bestowing upon them sanctifying grace? His prayer was the chief means by which He did so, outside His sacrifice during the Passion, because since the first moment of the Hypostatic Union, Christ already was offering to the Heavenly Father the oblation and sacrifice of His divine Person which He was to consummate upon Mount Calvary. The years He spent unknown and hidden at house of St. Joseph gave more glory to God than the years of Christ's public ministry, for each movement of charity by the Sacred Heart was infinitely meritorious and would of itself sufficed to have fully satisfied the divine ire of God and to have redeemed humanity: but that would not have satisfied the infinite love of Christ for each one of us.
The Protestants cannot see this because they have given themselves over to the practical consequences of nominalism, which denied the supernaturally intrinsic and extraordinary value of grace. If you belittle the concept of grace as taught by St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and before them by the Evangelists (especially St. John) and by St. Paul, then Protestantism happens.
The consequences of Protestantism were naturalism, materialism, class warfare, a dehumanized economic system, &c. It was the greatest ruin of Europe.
Oh, my, I got into a tangent there! Carry on... :detective: