Feast day: August 27

St. Monica

Mother · 331–387

Patron of Mothers, difficult marriages, wayward children

North African mother who prayed 17 years for her brilliant, wayward son — who became St. Augustine, and whose conversion she lived just long enough to see.

Monica was born about 332 in North Africa, of Christian parents, and was given in marriage to Patricius, a pagan town official of Tagaste — a man of hot temper and loose living. By her patience, gentleness, and refusal to answer anger with anger, she won him over the years to peace and, near the end of his life, to baptism, becoming a model and counselor to other unhappy wives of the town.

Her deepest anxiety, however, was her gifted eldest son, Augustine — clever, ambitious, and wayward, who took a mistress, fathered a son out of wedlock, and embraced the Manichean sect, breaking his mother's heart. Monica wept and prayed for his conversion for years, following him even across the sea to Italy when he slipped away from her to avoid her pleading.

A bishop she begged to argue with her son sent her away with words she never forgot: that the child of so many tears could not be lost. She held to that promise through long disappointment, until at Milan, under the preaching of St. Ambrose, Augustine at last surrendered and was baptized — the answer to a lifetime of prayer.

Soon after, as mother and son rested at Ostia waiting for the ship home, they shared a famous conversation about heaven and the life of the soul, and there Monica fell ill and died, in 387, saying she no longer had any reason to remain in this world now that her hope was fulfilled. She is honored as the patron of mothers and of all who pray for the conversion of those they love.

A bishop once told her, 'It is not possible that the son of so many tears should perish.' He was right.

“Nothing is far from God.”
— St. Monica

Image: Benozzo Gozzoli (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/10482a.htm