Saint Monica: Mother of Saint Augustine

Life and historical context

Monica was born around the year 332 in Tagaste (modern Souk Ahras, Algeria), a small town in the Roman province of Numidia, in a Christian Berber family. Almost everything we know about her comes from the writings of her son, Saint Augustine of Hippo, particularly from book IX of the Confessions and from his work On the Happy Life (De Beata Vita). She received a Christian education at home, especially from an elderly female slave who had served her father's family and who taught the young Monica the disciplines of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.¹

She was married, while still young, to Patricius, a pagan Roman official of moderate means in Tagaste. The marriage was difficult. Patricius was unfaithful and irascible; the Confessions describe him as easily roused to anger. Monica's response, recorded by Augustine with admiring precision, was to refuse to argue with him in his anger and to wait for moments of calm before raising any difficult matter. She bore him three children: Augustine (the eldest, born 354), Navigius, and Perpetua. She prayed continuously for the conversion of Patricius and was rewarded near the end of his life: he received Christian Baptism shortly before his death in 371.

Her dominant biographical concern, however, was Augustine. The Confessions records the long sequence of her prayers, fasts, and tears for her son's conversion. Augustine left the Catholic faith of his childhood in his late teens for the Manichean heresy and lived for years in concubinage with a woman whom he never married, with whom he had a son, Adeodatus. Monica grieved over this without ceasing for almost two decades. She is reported to have once asked a Catholic bishop to argue with Augustine and convince him to return to the faith; the bishop, an old man who had himself been a Manichee in his youth and knew that argument would be useless, refused, and said to her in the words preserved by Augustine: "Go your way, and may God be with you. It cannot be that the son of these tears should perish."²

She followed Augustine to Italy when he moved there in 383 to teach rhetoric, first to Rome and then to Milan. She was present in Milan during the years 385-387, when Augustine came under the influence of Saint Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, and gradually moved toward Catholic conversion. Augustine's Baptism by Ambrose at the Easter Vigil of 387 was the answer to a generation of his mother's prayers. The Confessions records, in book IX, the conversation Augustine and Monica had at Ostia, on the Tiber, in the late summer of 387, as they were preparing to return to North Africa together. Monica died at Ostia within days of this conversation, at about the age of fifty-six. Augustine buried her there and continued his journey home.³

Theological and spiritual significance

The Catholic veneration of Saint Monica is, principally, the veneration of the praying mother. Her significance is not in any theological writing or institutional founding (she wrote nothing, founded nothing, and exercised no ecclesiastical office) but in the persistence of her prayer for the conversion of her family, and in the answer the Lord gave to that prayer in the conversion of Augustine, who became one of the four great Latin Doctors of the Church and the principal Western theologian of the patristic age.

Augustine himself in book IX of the Confessions gives us our portrait of Monica. The portrait is honest: he describes her in her youth as having had a bad habit of secret drinking that she gave up after a slave girl mocked her, and he describes her in middle age as occasionally manipulative and overly intrusive in her concerns for him. But the dominant impression is of a woman of profound interior life, who did not impose her piety on others but practiced it consistently for decades, in difficult conditions, with full faith that God would answer.

Her place in Catholic spiritual theology is the place of all the praying mothers of the Church: those who continue, sometimes for decades, to pray and offer sacrifices for the conversion of children, spouses, and parents who have left or never come into the faith. The saying widely attributed to her bishop ( the son of these tears cannot be lost) has become one of the most-quoted Catholic encouragements to mothers and grandmothers in this situation.⁴

She was canonized by tradition (her cult was already universal in the medieval Catholic Church) rather than by formal modern process. Her relics were translated from Ostia to Rome in 1430, where they remain at the Basilica of Sant'Agostino in Campo Marzio (the Augustinian Church of Saint Augustine in Rome), in a chapel dedicated to her on the left side of the church, near the tomb of Saint Augustine's son Adeodatus.

Devotion and liturgical observance

The feast of Saint Monica is celebrated on 27 August in the universal Roman Calendar with the rank of memorial. The placement of the feast on the day before that of her son Saint Augustine (28 August) is an ancient liturgical conjunction reflecting the spiritual unity of mother and son in the order of grace.

The principal pilgrimage destination associated with Saint Monica is the Basilica of Sant'Agostino in Campo Marzio in Rome, where her relics are venerated. Other Augustinian foundations across the Catholic world preserve secondary relics and dedicate side altars to her memory. The town of Ostia, where she died and was first buried, preserves the church of Santa Aurea on the supposed site of her death and original tomb.

The traditional iconography of Saint Monica shows her in widow's habit (black veil and gown) holding a book of prayer or weeping into a handkerchief. Some Augustinian iconographic traditions show her in a brown or black Augustinian habit, in anticipation of the religious order her son's writings inspired. She is frequently depicted in pendant with her son Augustine, often with Monica praying and Augustine in the act of conversion. Her liturgical color on the feast is white.

Prayers and novenas associated with Saint Monica

The principal devotion to Saint Monica is the Novena to Saint Monica, prayed by mothers and grandmothers for the conversion of children, spouses, and family members who have fallen away from the Catholic faith. The novena is most commonly prayed in the nine days leading up to her feast on 27 August, but it is also prayed at any time of the year for the same intentions and over many years for the same petitioners.

A traditional brief prayer to Saint Monica:

Saint Monica, you waited many years for the conversion of your son. By your prayers and tears you obtained from God what no human persuasion could obtain. Pray for me now, that I may persevere in faithful prayer for those whose conversion I long to see, and that I may trust the timing of God's answer.

Catholics commonly pair Saint Monica devotions with the Holy Rosary, the Marian prayer of entrustment, and the Surrender Novena, particularly when the wait for a loved one's conversion has been long. For the spiritual fruit of Saint Monica's prayers, see Saint Augustine of Hippo. For broader theological context, see Catholic doctrine of the Communion of Saints.

Sources

Saint Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, particularly book IX (composed c. 397-400). The standard English translation is by Henry Chadwick (1991) and by Maria Boulding (1997). Augustine, De Beata Vita (composed 386), section 4. Catholic Encyclopedia (1907), "Saint Monica," available at newadvent.org. ↩
Augustine, Confessions, book III, chapter 12, on the bishop's reply to Monica. The standard reading of the phrase is that the bishop, having known Manichean error from inside, recognized that Augustine's was the kind of intellectual conversion that argument would not produce, but only the slow patience of grace. ↩
Augustine, Confessions, book IX, chapters 8-12. The famous vision at Ostia conversation between mother and son is at IX.10. ↩
Catholic Encyclopedia (1907), entry on Saint Monica, summarizing the patristic and medieval testimony. The bishop's saying is preserved in Confessions III.12. Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 2685-2699 (the Christian family in prayer). ↩