A praying mother
St Monica is the patron saint of abuse victims, alcoholics, wives and difficult marriages. She was the mother of St Augustine of Hippo and is most renowned for her constant prayers for his conversion to Christianity.
Monica was born in 333 in Tagaste, North Africa, 40 miles from the port city of Hippo. She was married to a pagan named Patricius with whom she had two sons, Augustine and Navigius, and one daughter named Perpetua. Patricius was violent and refused to allow Monica to baptise her children.
Grief and good advice
Throughout her life St Monica prayed constantly for the conversion of her husband, and one year before his death – after 30 years of her prayer – he converted to Christianity.
When Patricius died, Augustine was 17 and highly intelligent. St Monica sent her son to school in Carthage where he became a Manichaean, a major pagan religion at the time. When Augustine told Monica she was heartbroken and sent him away. She then famously visited a bishop for advice, who told her: “The child of those tears shall never perish.”
Monica subsequently resolved to reconcile with her son and she followed him to Italy. By this point her other children had entered religious life.
By the grace of God and the help of St Ambrose, Augustine eventually converted to Christianity.
Hopes fulfilled
In his book Confessions, St Augustine wrote of St Monica: “In place of a basket filled with fruits of the earth, she had learned to bring to the oratories of the martyrs a heart full of purer petitions, and to give all that she could to the poor – so that the communion of the Lord’s body might be rightly celebrated in those places where, after the example of his Passion, the martyrs had been sacrificed and crowned.”
Following St Augustine’s baptism, he and his mother intended to take the Word of God to Africa but she died. Augustine recorded her parting words to him: “Son, nothing in this world now affords me delight. I do not know what there is now left for me to do or why I am still here, all my hopes in this world being now fulfilled.”
