Monica

Saint Monica was a Christian matron of the fourth century, born at Thagaste in the Roman province of Numidia in North Africa, in the region of present-day Algeria. Almost everything that can be known of her life depends on the Confessions of her son Augustine of Hippo, written years after her death. She was raised in a Christian family and, while still young, was married to Patricius, a curial of Thagaste who was not a Christian. Patricius was quick-tempered and unfaithful, and Monica’s early married life was marked by the effort to keep peace in a difficult household that also included a hostile mother-in-law. Augustine records that she won over both her husband and her mother-in-law by patience, refusal to quarrel, and persistent prayer rather than by confrontation. The couple had several children, of whom the best known are Augustine, his brother Navigius, and a sister who later lived in a community of consecrated women at Hippo. Augustine also recounts that as a girl Monica had begun to sip wine in secret when sent to draw it from the cellar, until a slave’s insult shamed her into breaking the habit—an episode later associated with her patronage of those struggling with drink.

Monica’s reputation in later Christian tradition rests above all on her long intercession for Augustine. After a Christian upbringing he abandoned regular practice, took a concubine, fathered a son named Adeodatus, and for many years adhered to the Manichaean sect, whose teaching Monica found abhorrent. She is said to have refused him her table for a time, then to have been reassured by a dream and by a bishop’s counsel that a son of so many tears would not perish. Patricius received baptism late in life and died while Augustine was still a young man; Monica remained a widow thereafter. When Augustine left secretly for Rome to advance his career as a teacher of rhetoric, she followed him, first to Rome and then to Milan, where he obtained a prestigious chair. In Milan she found a powerful ally in Bishop Ambrose, whose preaching helped prepare Augustine’s mind for Catholic Christianity. At Ambrose’s request she also set aside some North African customs, including offerings of food at the tombs of the dead.

Augustine’s conversion in 386 and his baptism by Ambrose at Easter 387 were, in Monica’s own understanding, the answer to decades of prayer. Mother and son, together with Adeodatus and a small group of friends, then planned to return to Africa and live in a kind of philosophical and religious retirement. While they waited for a ship at the port of Ostia, Monica and Augustine stood at a window overlooking a garden and spoke together of the life of the saints and of a wisdom beyond all language; Augustine later described this conversation as a brief shared ascent toward eternal truth. A few days afterward she fell ill with a fever. She told her sons that she no longer wished to be buried in her own country beside her husband, as she had once desired, because she cared only to be remembered at the Lord’s altar wherever she might lie. She died at Ostia at the age of fifty-six, in 387, and was buried there.

Monica’s cult developed early, especially in North Africa and in the Augustinian tradition. She was not canonized by a formal papal process of the later medieval kind; her veneration is ancient and pre-congregation. Her relics were translated in the fifteenth century from Ostia to the Church of Sant'Agostino in Rome, where they remain. In the Roman calendar her feast was long observed on 4 May; since the reform of 1969 it has been kept on 27 August, the day before the feast of Augustine. She is invoked as a patron of mothers and wives, of widows, of those in difficult or unfaithful marriages, of parents distressed by their children, of the conversion of relatives, and of people struggling with alcoholism.