Monica

Saint Monica was born in the fourth century at Thagaste in Numidia, in Roman North Africa (the site of modern Souk Ahras in Algeria), into a Christian household. Later writers have often described her family as Berber in origin, though the sources closest to her life do not dwell on ethnicity. She was raised in the Christian faith from childhood. While still young she was given in marriage to Patricius, a municipal official of Thagaste who remained a pagan for most of his life. Patricius was known for a violent temper and for infidelity, yet Monica persevered in the marriage with patience, prayer, and a refusal to answer insult with insult. She also won over a difficult mother-in-law. According to her son Augustine’s Confessions, Patricius received baptism not long before his death, which occurred while Augustine was still a young man.

Monica and Patricius had at least three children: Augustine, born in 354; a son named Navigius; and a daughter who later embraced the religious life. Monica’s long struggle over Augustine’s spiritual course became the central drama of her later years. Augustine abandoned the Christianity of his childhood, lived with a concubine, fathered a son named Adeodatus, and adhered for a time to Manichaeism. Monica wept, fasted, and sought the counsel of clergy. One bishop, unnamed in the Confessions, told her that it was not possible that the son of so many tears should perish. She followed Augustine from Thagaste to Carthage and, after he slipped away to Rome without her knowledge, she crossed the sea, found him in Italy, and accompanied him to Milan.

In Milan Monica came under the pastoral influence of Bishop Ambrose, whose preaching also moved Augustine. At Ambrose’s advice she set aside some African devotional customs that differed from Milanese practice. After Augustine’s conversion in 386 and his baptism by Ambrose at Easter of 387, mother and son prepared to return to Africa. While they waited at the port of Ostia they shared a conversation on eternal life that Augustine later recorded as a moment of joint mystical insight. Shortly afterward Monica fell ill with a fever. She told those around her that she no longer cared to be buried beside her husband in her own country, asking only that she be remembered at the altar of the Lord wherever they might be. She died at Ostia in 387, in the fifty-sixth year of her age, and was buried there.

Veneration of Monica spread with the fame of Augustine’s Confessions, which made her a model of the Christian mother and of persevering prayer for the conversion of family members. Augustine also recorded an incident of her girlhood in which she was rebuked for a growing habit of tasting wine in the cellar and thereafter overcame it; that episode later contributed to her association with those struggling against drink. Her relics were translated from Ostia to Rome in the fifteenth century and are honored in the Basilica of Sant’Agostino. In the Roman calendar her feast, long kept on 4 May, was transferred in the twentieth century to 27 August, the day before the feast of Augustine. She is invoked especially for mothers, married women and widows, and for those distressed by a spouse’s infidelity or a child’s wandering from the faith.