St. Monica

St. Monica was born in 331 at Tagaste in Roman North Africa (modern Souk Ahras, Algeria) to a Christian Berber family. She was given in marriage to Patricius, a pagan townsman of some standing whose hot temper and infidelities she bore with a patience that became proverbial. Her steady goodness eventually won over both her difficult mother-in-law and her husband, who was baptized shortly before his death. Of her three children, the eldest would cause her the deepest grief and bring her the greatest glory: Augustine. Nearly everything we know of Monica comes from Augustine's Confessions, where he paints an intimate portrait of a mother who pursued his soul with tears and prayers through seventeen years of his waywardness—his embrace of the Manichean sect, his ambitions, and his irregular life. A bishop whom she begged to argue with her son famously consoled her, as Augustine records, that 'the son of these tears cannot perish.' When Augustine slipped away to Rome, she followed him, and then on to Milan, where she attached herself to the ministry of St. Ambrose, whose preaching was drawing her son toward the Catholic faith. Her perseverance was rewarded: Augustine was converted in 386 and baptized by Ambrose at the Easter Vigil of 387, with Monica present. As mother and son waited at the port of Ostia to sail home to Africa, they shared the celebrated conversation recorded in the Confessions, rising together in contemplation toward eternal wisdom. Monica told her son that nothing in this life now held her, since her one desire had been granted. Within days she fell ill and died at Ostia in the autumn of 387, at fifty-six, asking only to be remembered at the altar of the Lord. She was buried at Ostia; in 1430 her relics were translated to Rome, where they rest in the Basilica of Sant'Agostino near the Piazza Navona. Her feast on August 27, the eve of her son's, expresses the bond between them. Venerated since antiquity, Monica is the patroness of mothers, wives, and those in difficult marriages, and a special intercessor for parents praying for children who have wandered from the faith.