I haven’t much time left in my workday to give enough praise to Saint Monica whose feast day we celebrate today, but I would like to emphasize a few of the virtues that made her so great.

This is a mother who never gave up on a wayward son named Augustine. Let that be a lesson to all those mothers who are suffering through the rebellion of their children. Nor did she give up on her pagan and, at times, violent and unfaithful husband, Patritius, whom she won for Christ at the eleventh hour. Where Monica lived in the city of Tagaste, in North Africa, in the mid-fourth century, Catholic Christians were a minority.  Most of the people were still pagan and there were plenty of sects and heresies as well.  Catholic women, who were in a similar situation as Monica, with pagan husbands from arranged marriages, looked up to her as a model of patience. Her advice was to speak to their spouses when the opportunity was ripe, and never respond to a husband’s anger with abrasive words, rather keep silence and be patient.

With the conversion of her husband, her hopes soared that his influence would bring about their son’s conversion, for Patritius was always very good to his son, supporting him in his education and, making a man out of a boy. Even though Augustine’s parents did convince him to enroll as a catechumen, his mother’s ardent aspiration did not materialize, as young Augustine was off on his own keeping society with dangerous companions and imbibing the proliferating doctrines of the new and popular Manichaean sect. So upset was Monica when Augustine abandoned the catechumenate that she even ordered him out of the house; she soon after relented when she received a vision in her sleep assuring her that the young man would become a Christian.  It would take eighteen long years before the mother’s tears and prayers would win the battle and conquer the vagrant soul of her first-born son. Eighteen years!  But she always believed and hoped. One bishop, known for his holiness, encouraged her at a time when she was most desolate: “It cannot be that God would allow the child of so many tears to be lost.”

One day, when Augustine was around thirty-years-old, he told his mother that he was going down to the docks to see a friend who was embarking for Italy.  He lied to his mother, foolishly imagining that if he told her the truth it would end up in an emotional scene.  It was Augustine himself who boarded that ship to Rome.  When Monica discovered this, what did she do? Did she retreat into despair? Did she complain to God? No, she did not.  And that is why I love Saint Monica so much.  She got on the next ship and followed her son to Rome.  And when she discovered in Rome that Augustine had gone north to Milan, she took off for Milan. You all know the rest of the story, how she convinced her son to go and speak to the bishop, Saint Ambrose. This meeting between the two doctors was a major step in Augustine’s conversion, which came shortly afterwards.

But I am writing about Monica.  After the baptism of her son in 386, the two were inseparable.  They settled for a time near the seashore in Ostia where Augustine, always the scholar, would hold weekly symposiums on the Faith with his Catholic friends. His mother held the chair of honor in every meeting, often offering her wisdom and her questions to the participants.  It was here as she and Augustine were gazing one night at the stars and speaking about the mystery of the Blessed Trinity that they both, as one mind, entered into an ecstasy, each receiving the same identical light and vision, a vision not of forms but of spirit.  Saint Augustine writes in his Confessions that human language could not convey what they experienced that night in that divine light.

Soon after this experience Saint Monica as a gentle mother told her son very gracefully and sweetly that her mission was over and that she had a premonition that she would soon die. On her deathbed she had one request of her son, who by this time had determined to become a priest, that was that he would “remember her soul at the altar.” It was on May 4, 487, less than a year after Augustine’s conversion that Saint Monica left this world. He was thirty-three and she was fifty-one.  Their bodies rest together today in the Church of Saint Augustine in Rome.

Tags: Saint Ambrose, Saint Augustine, Saint Monica