Saint Monica

Almost all we know of Monica comes from her son’s Confessions, where Augustine wrote of her with deep love. She was born into a Christian family at Thagaste in North Africa around 331, and she was given in marriage to Patricius, a pagan official with a violent temper. She bore his outbursts with patience, and won him over by her gentleness. He was baptized a year before he died. Her mother-in-law, who had also been hostile to her, was won over too.

Her greatest sorrow was her gifted eldest son. Augustine drifted from the faith of his childhood, joined the Manichees and lived with a mistress. Monica wept and prayed for him for years. She begged a bishop to talk to him, and the bishop, tired of her pleading, told her: “Go your way; it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish.”

When Augustine left Africa for Rome, slipping away by night so that she could not stop him, she followed him across the sea, and then on to Milan. There she found a friend and guide in Saint Ambrose, and there, at Easter 387, she saw her son baptized.

On the way home to Africa they stayed at Ostia, the port of Rome. Leaning together at a window overlooking a garden, mother and son spoke of eternal life, and for a moment, Augustine writes, they touched it. A few days later she fell ill. She told her sons not to worry about where she would be buried: “Lay this body anywhere… This only I ask, that you remember me at the altar of the Lord, wherever you may be.” She died there, aged fifty-six.