The edition was supported by and begun at the instigation of the Catholic Church, and was done by the Benedictine monks of the pontifical Abbey of St Jerome-in-the-City.

In 1907, Pope Pius X commissioned the Benedictine Order to produce as pure a version as possible of Jerome's original text after conducting an extensive search for as-yet-unstudied manuscripts, particularly in Spain.

[3] This text was originally planned as the basis of a revised complete official Bible for the Catholic church to replace the Clementine edition.

[4] The first volume, the Pentateuch, completed in 1926, lists as primary editor Henri Quentin, whose editorial methods, described in his book Mémoire sur l'établissement du texte de la Vulgate,[5] proved to be somewhat controversial.

[8] By the 1970s, as a result of liturgical changes that had spurred the Vatican to produce a new translation of the Latin Bible, the Nova Vulgata, the Benedictine edition was no longer required for official purposes,[9] and the abbey was suppressed in 1984.