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How Love Leads to Charity

Linguistically speaking, charity began with St. Jerome
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Charity begins with love--literally. Back in the 4th century, Pope Damasus commissioned ascetic scholar St. Jerome to prepare a Latin translation of the Bible now known as the Vulgate, since the translation was into the common people's "vulgar" Latin. Jerome's sources were mainly in Greek, and in trying to get from Greek to Latin, one of the first problems he faced was what to do with agape.

Agape is a Greek word meaning "love." But it's love of a special sort, as in "Love (agape) the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind" and "Love (agape) your neighbor as yourself."

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Almanac