Saint Monica

St. Monica grew up at Tagaste in a Christian family. Her upbringing fell largely to an old servant who had carried St. Monica's father on her back when he was a baby. The servant would not let St. Monica and her sisters drink even water between meals, however thirsty they were.

Sent down to draw wine from the cask, St. Monica took to tasting it first. She took a little more each day, until she was drinking almost a whole small cup. Then another servant, a maid who went down to the cellar with her, quarrelled with her and mocked her for the habit, and St. Monica gave it up on the spot.

When she was old enough, St. Monica was married to Patricius, a pagan member of the town council. He had a violent temper and was unfaithful to her, but she never quarrelled with him over it, and when he raged she kept silent until he had calmed down. Other wives in the town, whose milder husbands still left bruises on their faces, asked her privately why Patricius never struck her, and she told them, half in jest, to think of the marriage contract read out to them as the paper that had made them servants.

Her eldest son, St. Augustine, was born on November 13, 354 AD, and a second son, Navigius, and a daughter followed. She did not have him baptized as a baby but had him signed with the cross and given salt, the rite that enrolled a child as a catechumen. At fifteen, idle at home, he was warned by her in private against sleeping with women, and he dismissed it as a woman's advice.

St. Monica won Patricius for the faith near the end of his life, and he was baptized about 371 AD and died soon after. In 373 AD St. Augustine, by then a student at Carthage, joined the Manichaeans, a sect he stayed with for about nine years. She wept for him more than mothers weep over a child's death, and for a time would not let him live or eat in her house.

In a dream she stood grieving on a wooden rule and saw her son standing beside her on it, and after the dream she took him back. She then begged a bishop to argue him out of the sect, but he told her to leave the young man alone and pray, because he would find the error for himself by reading. She kept pressing him with tears until, a little annoyed, he sent her away with a blessing, and she took his answer as a voice from heaven.

In 383 AD St. Augustine resolved to sail from Carthage to Italy, and his mother, grieving, followed him down to the sea. She held on to him, wanting either to keep him home or to go with him, so he pretended he had to wait with a friend for a good wind. She agreed to spend the night close to the ship, in a chapel in memory of St. Cyprian, and there she prayed that he would not sail.

He sailed in the dark, and in the morning she stood on the shore, beside herself with grief, with his ship out of sight. Later she sailed after him, and when the sea turned dangerous she calmed the sailors, because a vision had told her they would arrive safely. She found him at Milan no longer a Manichaean but not yet a Catholic, and told him calmly that she believed she would see him one before she died.

At Milan St. Monica went to church twice a day and listened eagerly to the sermons of the bishop, Saint Ambrose. In Africa she had taken cakes, bread and wine to the shrines of the martyrs, but at Milan the doorkeeper turned her away. When she learned that St. Ambrose had banned the custom, she gave it up at once and blamed her own habit rather than question him.

In 386 AD, in a garden at Milan, her son read a passage from the Letter to the Romans and his doubts left him. He and his companion St. Alypius, who had read on and joined him, went straight in to tell her, and she leapt for joy and blessed God. She saw that God had given her more than all her prayers had asked, since her son now wanted neither a wife nor anything else the world could offer.

At Easter, on April 25, 387 AD, St. Ambrose baptized St. Augustine at Milan, together with St. Alypius and Adeodatus, St. Augustine's son. The Order of Saint Augustine counts it St. Monica's great joy to have witnessed that baptism. St. Augustine, his mother and their companions then set out for Africa and stopped at Ostia to wait for a ship.

There mother and son stood alone at a window over the garden of the house, resting after the long journey. They talked about what the eternal life of the saints would be like, and St. Augustine wrote that for a moment they touched eternal Wisdom with all the effort of their hearts, then sighed and came back to the sound of their own voices. She then told him she had wanted to live only to see him a Catholic Christian, that God had given her far more than that, and that she no longer knew why she was still here.

Less than a week after the talk at the window, St. Monica fell ill with a fever. One day she fainted, and when she came round she looked at her sons, St. Augustine and Navigius, and told them to bury her there. Navigius wished aloud that she might die in her own country rather than abroad, and she stopped him with a look.

For years she had kept a grave ready beside her husband's body, and had wanted people to speak of the two of them lying together. St. Augustine was glad to see that the wish had left her. She died on the ninth day of the fever, at the age of fifty-five.

When she had died, Evodius, a young man of St. Augustine's own town who had joined them, took up the book of psalms and began to sing, and everyone in the house sang the responses. She was buried at Ostia, near the church of the martyr St. Aurea. Writing the Confessions about ten years later, St. Augustine asked every reader to remember her at the altar.

In 1430 AD Pope Martin V had her relics carried from Ostia to Rome, and miracles occurred along the way. They rest today in the Basilica of Saint Augustine in Campo Marzio, in a green marble urn beneath the altar of her chapel.