August 27 across 2,026 years of Catholic history

event · OSTIA, autumn 387 AD

Saint Monica dies at Ostia on the ninth day of her fever

The widow of Tagaste, fifty-five, died in a rented house at the Tiber mouth while her household waited for a ship to Africa.

A fresco-style painting of a bare whitewashed room: an older woman in a dark widow's veil and mantle lies dead on a low wooden bed, her hands joined on her breast, while a man bends over her with one hand at her head and the other at his eyes, and behind him three others stand — a man in a red tunic, a boy held quiet by a hand on his shoulder, and a young man holding an open book — beside a shuttered window opening onto a garden and the harbour beyond. — St. Augustine at the deathbed of his mother, St. Monica, in the rented house at Ostia, where she died on the ninth day of a fever in the autumn of 387 AD.
About this picture
AI-generated image, in the manner of Italian quattrocento buon fresco, from the paper's reference portrait based on Death of St Monica (scene 13, south wall) (Benozzo Gozzoli (1420-1497), 1464-1465 AD, Sant'Agostino, San Gimignano, Italy) View source artwork.

Saint Monica died at Ostia on the ninth day of a fever, in a house her son's household had taken while they waited to sail home to Africa. She told her two sons to bury her where she fell and to remember her at the Lord's altar, giving up the grave she had prepared beside her husband at Tagaste. St. Augustine closed her eyes and did not weep until he had slept.

6 min read

A woman in a dark widow's veil and mantle stands with her grown son in the deep window opening of a whitewashed upper room, both looking out over a walled garden towards tiled roofs and the flat water of the river mouth beyond; behind them, three of the household go about their work in the shadowed room. — About this picture
AI-generated image, in the manner of Italian quattrocento buon fresco, from the paper's reference portrait based on Death of St Monica (scene 13, south wall) (Benozzo Gozzoli, 1464-1465 AD, Sant'Agostino, San Gimignano, Italy) View source artwork.

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.

4 min read

More in this edition

A woman in her middle fifties in a dark wool tunic and veil with a white cloth at the brow sits upright on a plain stool beside a bare wooden table holding an untouched cup and a small jug, while behind her a man folds cloth, a child stands in the open doorway and a boy sits on the step, with a colonnaded street and the pale water of the river mouth beyond. — About this picture
AI-generated image, in the manner of Italian quattrocento buon fresco, from the paper's reference portrait based on Death of St Monica (scene 13, south wall) (Benozzo Gozzoli (1420-1497), 1464-1465 AD, Sant'Agostino, San Gimignano, Italy) View source artwork.

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

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

Saint Monica, fifty-five, sat for an hour in the rented house at the Tiber mouth where her household is waiting for a ship to Africa. She answered questions on the closing sailing season, the wine she gave up as a girl, her husband's temper, the years she refused her son her table, and the bishop who told her the son of these tears could not perish. She has given up the grave she prepared for herself at Tagaste, beside her husband.

4 min read

Today in the Church

Memorial of Saint Monica

On this day in the Church

2006 At the Angelus at Castel Gandolfo on her memorial, Pope Benedict XVI held up St. Monica and her son St. Augustine to families, saying that as St. Augustine himself put it, his mother gave birth to him twice.Source
2014 At the general audience in St Peter's Square, Pope Francis named the memorial of St. Monica and commended her to young people, the sick and the newly married.Our report Source

Quote of the day

“Lay this body anywhere, let not the care for it trouble you at all. This only I ask, that you will remember me at the Lord's altar, wherever you be.”

— St. Monica, to her sons at Ostia, 387 AD, St. Augustine, Confessions IX.11.27, trans. J. G. Pilkington (NPNF, 1887)