The saints

Saint Monica

Mother of Saint Augustine · Feast day August 27 · About 331 to 387 · Thagaste and Ostia, North Africa · Also known as Monica of Hippo

Saint Monica was the devout mother of Saint Augustine, who prayed and wept for her brilliant, wayward son for nearly thirty years until she saw him at last converted and baptized. She is the patron of mothers and of everyone who loves someone far from God, the living proof that faithful prayer, though it seems unanswered for decades, is never once wasted.

They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.Psalm 126:5 (KJV)

The world she was born into

Monica was born around the year 331 in Roman North Africa, most likely of Berber descent, in the town of Thagaste in what is now Algeria. It was a settled, prosperous corner of the empire where Christianity had long taken root but had not swept everything before it, and homes were often divided between the old pagan gods and the church. Monica was raised a Christian by a strict old servant who had helped raise her father, a woman who taught the girls of the household discipline, modesty, and the fear of God, and who left a mark on Monica that lasted her whole life.

She grew into a woman of deep and simple faith, formed by the ordinary rhythms of the North African church, its prayers, its fasts, its care for the poor, and its memory of the martyrs. Nothing about her early life marked her out for the fame that would one day come to her. She was not learned, she wrote no books, and she held no office. What she had was a heart wholly given to God and an extraordinary, stubborn love, and out of those two things God would work one of the most consequential rescues in the history of the church.

A patient wife in a hard house

As a young woman Monica was given in marriage to Patricius, a pagan man of the town, a minor official of hot temper, loose morals, and generous but volatile spirit. It was not an easy marriage. Patricius was unfaithful and quick to anger, and his mother lived with them and was set against Monica at first. Monica bore all of it with a patience that became famous among the women of the town. Where other wives came to her bruised in body and spirit by their husbands, she counseled them, half in earnest and half in wit, to remember that the marriage contract had made them servants, and to hold their tongues when their husbands were angry and reason with them only when they were calm.

By that steady gentleness and unwearied prayer she slowly won over the household that had resented her. She converted her hostile mother-in-law into a friend, and over long years she wore down the hardness of Patricius himself, never nagging him toward the faith but preaching to him, as Augustine later put it, by her character. Her patience was rewarded near the end of his life, when Patricius became a catechumen and was baptized before he died. She had three children who lived, of whom the eldest, Augustine, was gifted far beyond the rest, and into him she poured her whole anxious, hoping heart.

The long years of tears

As Augustine grew into a brilliant and restless young man, he broke his mother's heart by degrees. He chased ambition and pleasure, took a mistress and fathered a son outside marriage, and worst of all in Monica's eyes he abandoned the faith of his childhood for the Manichees, a fashionable sect that promised secret wisdom and denied the gospel she loved. She wept over him as over one dead, and for a time she would not even share her table or her roof with him, so grieved was she by his errors, until a dream persuaded her that he would one day stand where she stood.

She never stopped praying. Augustine himself later recorded, in the Confessions, how his mother carried him constantly before God with tears, kneeling at the altar morning and evening, pleading for the soul of her son. In her distress she begged a certain aged bishop to argue with Augustine and win him back from error, and the bishop, knowing how zealous the young man was in his wrong ideas, told her only to keep praying and be patient, for the boy would come to see his mistakes himself. When she pressed him with fresh tears, he gave her the words that steadied her for years to come: Go your way, and God bless you, for it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish. She took it as a message from heaven.

Following him across the sea

When Augustine resolved to leave Africa for Rome to advance his career, Monica was determined not to lose him, and she came down to the harbor meaning either to hold him back or to go with him. Augustine, unwilling to be followed, deceived her, telling her he was only seeing off a friend, and sailed away by night while she prayed in a chapel by the shore. She woke to find him gone, and grieved bitterly, and then did the only thing she knew to do. She followed. She crossed the sea after him, endured a terrifying storm on the voyage in which she comforted the sailors rather than the reverse, and arrived in Italy to find that he had already moved on to Milan, still unconverted but drawing nearer to grace than either of them knew.

In Milan she found the great bishop Ambrose, and she attached herself to his teaching and to the church there with all her heart. Ambrose came to love and admire her, telling Augustine that he was the son of such tears that he could not be lost. Monica humbly submitted her old African customs to the discipline of the Milanese church at the bishop's word, giving up practices she had kept all her life the moment she understood they were not fitting, and she prayed on, sensing that the answer to her thirty years of pleading was somewhere very near.

The prayer answered and the vision at Ostia

When at last Augustine was converted in a garden in Milan, broken and remade by grace, his very first act was to go indoors and tell his mother. Monica's long grief broke into a joy beyond words. She had asked God for one thing across three decades, that her son become a Christian, and now he was giving himself wholly to God, becoming far more than she had ever dared to ask. She rejoiced, Augustine wrote, and counted it that God had done for her exceeding abundantly above all she could ask or think. He was baptized by Ambrose at Easter in the year 387, and Monica's life's work was finished.

As they waited at the port of Ostia to sail home to Africa, mother and son stood together one evening at a window overlooking a garden, and fell into a conversation so full of God that Augustine set it down forever in the Confessions as one of the summits of his life. Rising through their talk of the passing world toward the eternal life of the saints, the two of them together seemed for a moment to touch the very edge of heaven and the wisdom of God, before sinking back into ordinary speech. Then Monica turned to her son and told him that her one desire in life had been to see him a Christian before she died, and that God had now granted it beyond measure, so that she no longer knew what she was doing still in this world, for nothing here held her any longer.

Lay this body anywhere

Within days of that conversation Monica fell ill with a fever at Ostia, far from the North African soil where she had always wished to be buried beside her husband Patricius. When her sons worried that she would die in a strange land so far from home, she put their fear gently aside with words that have comforted the grieving ever since. Nothing is far from God, she told them, and she did not fear that he would fail to know where to find her and raise her up at the last day. Lay this body anywhere, she said, and let not the care of it trouble you; this only I ask, that you would remember me at the altar of the Lord, wherever you may be.

She died at Ostia at about the age of fifty-six, nine days into her illness. Augustine, who would go on to become the greatest theologian of the Western church, knew that under God he owed his very soul to her tears, and he wrote of her death with a tenderness that has kept her memory green for more than sixteen centuries. He fought back his weeping at the funeral and then broke down alone, and comforted himself by asking every reader of his Confessions to remember Monica at the altar, so that the last request of his dying mother would be answered by strangers she never met, in ages she never saw. It is being answered still.

Why Monica still matters

Monica is the patron of every mother who prays for a child who has wandered, and of everyone who loves someone far from God and fears their prayers are only falling into silence. Her life is the answer to that fear. She prayed for nearly thirty years with no visible result, watching her gifted son sink deeper into error, and then saw the whole of her longing granted at once, and more besides, for the son she wept over became a light to the whole church. She teaches that the prayers of a faithful heart are never lost, that God keeps every tear in his bottle, and that no one is beyond the reach of a patient love that will not let go. They that sow in tears, the psalm promises, shall reap in joy, and Monica sowed for thirty years and reaped a harvest that has never stopped.

A note for all traditions: the saints are honored across the church as examples of faith and, in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, as friends who pray with us, never worshiped, for worship belongs to God alone. What Scripture records and what later tradition holds are distinguished above. In every tradition there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, and every believer, not only the saints, is called to follow him.

Related: Saint Augustine · Patron saint of mothers · Saints for August 27 · Saint of the day