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legacy · VATICAN CITY, 27 August 2014 AD

Pope Francis hands Saint Monica to the young, sick and newly married

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Saint Monica
A fresco of St. Monica, veiled in dark blue and wimpled in white, hands folded before her, set within a painted niche with a scalloped red canopy and a halo behind her head.
St. Monica, fresco by Benozzo Gozzoli on a pillar of the apsidal chapel of Sant'Agostino in San Gimignano, Italy, 1464-1465 AD.

VATICAN CITY, 27 August 2014 AD — Pope Francis closed this morning’s general audience in St Peter’s Square by naming the day. “Today we celebrate the memory of St Monica, mother of St Augustine,” he said, asking that her love for the Lord show young people the centrality of God, encourage the sick “to confront moments of suffering with faith”, and inspire the newly married “to educate in a Christian manner, the children that the Lord may give you.”

The catechesis before it was not a feast-day address: Pope Francis spent it on the Church as one and holy, and called division in a Christian community “one of the gravest sins”.

That closing greeting is a fixed weekly form; a week earlier, in the same square, it named no saint. Today the calendar filled it, and St. Monica went to people at the start of something rather than to the bereaved.

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Catholic Saints News tells the lives of the saints as news from their own time and place. This story was written with AI from the historical record, and we read and approved it before it ran.

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Image. St Monica (on the pillar), Benozzo Gozzoli, 1464-1465 AD, Sant'Agostino, San Gimignano, Italy — see the original.

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A fresco of St. Monica standing in a niche, wearing a dark grey habit and wimple with a golden halo against a scalloped red shell-niche, holding a red leather-bound book.

Pope Leo XIV said the Mass opening the Order of Saint Augustine's 188th Ordinary General Chapter in the Basilica of Saint Augustine in Campo Marzio, the church where the relics of St. Monica have rested since 1430 AD. He preached on listening, humility and unity, and told the capitulars that no one should think they have all the answers. Pope Francis opened the Order's previous chapter in the same basilica in 2013 AD.

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Also in the edition of Thursday, 27 August 2026

feature · OSTIA, Roman Italy, autumn 387 AD

At an Ostia window, St. Monica has nothing left to want

This month at Ostia, waiting for a ship to Africa that had not come, Saint Monica and her son Saint Augustine stood at an upstairs window over the garden and talked about what the eternal life of the saints would be. She told him there that she had no pleasure left in anything in this life and did not know what she was still doing here. Five days later the fever took her, and the household that heard her at the window did not treat her death as an interruption.

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Monica and Augustine at Ostia · Part 1 · OSTIA, autumn 387 AD

'Nothing is far to God': an hour with Saint Monica at Ostia

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