On Aug. 27, one day before the feast of her son St. Augustine, the Church honors St. Monica, whose holy example and fervent intercession led to one of the most dramatic conversions in Church history.
Monica was born into a Catholic family in 332, in the North African city of Tagaste (located in present-day Algeria). She was raised by a maidservant who taught her the virtues of obedience and temperance. While still relatively young, she married Patricius, a Roman civil servant with a bad temper and a disdain for his wife's religion.
Monica dealt patiently with his distressing behavior, which included infidelity to their marriage vows. But she experienced a greater grief when he would not allow their three children – Augustine, Nagivius and Perpetua – to be baptized. When Augustine, the oldest, became sick and was in danger of death, Patricius gave consent for his baptism, but withdrew it when he recovered.
Monica's long-suffering patience and prayers eventually helped Patricius to see the error of his ways, and he was baptized into the Church one year before his death in 371. Her oldest son, however, soon embraced a way of life that brought her further grief, as he fathered a child out of wedlock in 372. One year later, he began to practice the occult religion of Manichaeism.
In her distress and grief, Monica initially shunned her oldest son. However, she experienced a mysterious dream that strengthened her hope for Augustine's soul, in which a messenger assured her: "Your son is with you." After this experience, which took place around 377, she allowed him back into her home and continued to beg God for his conversion.
But that would not take place for another nine years. In the meantime, Monica sought the advice of local clergy, wondering what they might do to persuade her son away from the Manichean heresy. One bishop, who had once belonged to that sect himself, assured Monica that it was "impossible that the son of such tears should perish."
These tears and prayers intensified when Augustine, at 29, abandoned Monica without warning as she passed the night praying in a chapel. Without saying goodbye to his mother, Augustine boarded a ship bound for Rome. Yet even this painful event would serve God's greater purpose, as Augustine left to become a teacher in the place where he was destined to become a Catholic.
Under the influence of the bishop St. Ambrose of Milan, Augustine renounced the teaching of the Manichees around 384. Monica followed her son to Milan and drew encouragement from her son's growing interest in the saintly bishop's preaching. After three years of struggle against his own desires and perplexities, Augustine succumbed to God's grace and was baptized in 387.
Shortly before her death, Monica shared a profound mystical experience of God with Augustine, who chronicled the event in his "Confessions." Finally, she told him: "Son, for myself I have no longer any pleasure in anything in this life. Now that my hopes in this world are satisfied, I do not know what more I want here or why I am here."
"The only thing I ask of you both," she told Augustine and his brother Nagivius, "is that you make remembrance of me at the altar of the Lord wherever you are."
St. Monica died at age 56, in the year 387.
Augustine recounted her in his Confessions: "I will not speak of her gifts, but of Thy gift in her; for she neither made herself nor trained herself. Thou didst create her, and neither her father nor mother knew what kind of being was to come forth from them. And it was the rod of Thy Christ, the discipline of Thy only Son, that trained her in Thy fear, in the house of one of Thy faithful ones who was a sound member of Thy Church."
St. Monica is the patroness of abuse victims, alcoholics, difficult marriages, disappointing children, homemakers, married women, mothers, victims of adultery, victims of verbal abuse, widows and wives. She has also become the inspiration for the St. Monica Sodality, which encourages prayer and penance among Catholics whose children have left the faith.
Learn more
The St. Monica Sodality began at St. John Cantius Church of Chicago in 1995. The Sodality's purpose is to pray for a return to Catholic unity and provide prayerful support for those who have experienced the loss of faith of a loved one. For more, go online to www.cantius.org/go/organizations/category/st_monica_sodality.
–Benjamin Mann, Catholic News Agency
On Aug. 28 the Church honors St. Augustine of Hippo. Augustine was born at the town of Tagaste (now Souk-Ahras, in modern day Algeria) on Nov. 13, 354, and grew to become one the most significant and influential thinkers in the history of the Church. His teachings were the foundation of Christian doctrine for a millennium.
The story of his life, up until his conversion, is written in the autobiographical "Confessions," the most intimate and well-known glimpse into an individual's soul ever written, as well as a fascinating philosophical, theological, mystical, poetic and literary work.
Augustine, though being brought up in early childhood as a Christian, lived a dissolute life of revelry and sin, and soon drifted away from the Church – thinking that he wasn't necessarily leaving Christ, of whose name he acknowledges "I kept it in the recesses of my heart; and all that presented itself to me without that Divine name, though it might be elegant, well written, and even replete with truth, did not altogether carry me away" ("Confessions," I, iv).
He went to study in Carthage and became well-known in the city for his brilliant mind and rhetorical skills and sought a career as an orator or lawyer. But he also discovered and fell in love with philosophy at the age of 19, a love he pursued with great vehemence.
He was attracted to Manichaeanism at this time, after its devotees had promised him that they had scientific answers to the mystery of nature, could disprove the Scriptures, and could explain the problem of evil. Augustine became a follower for nine years, learning all there was to learn in it before rejecting it as incoherent and fraudulent.
He went to Rome and then Milan in 386 where he met St. Ambrose, the bishop and Doctor of the Church, whose sermons inspired him to look for the truth he had always sought in the faith he had rejected. He received baptism and soon after, his mother, St. Monica, died with the knowledge that all she had hoped for in this world had been fulfilled.
st-augustine-2He returned to Africa, to his hometown of Tagaste, "having now cast off from himself the cares of the world, he lived for God with those who accompanied him, in fasting, prayers, and good works, meditating on the law of the Lord by day and by night."
On a visit to Hippo he was proclaimed priest and then bishop against his will. He later accepted it as the will of God and spent the rest of his life as the pastor of the North African town, from where he spent much time refuting the writings of heretics.
Augustine also wrote "The City of God," a response against the pagans who charged that the fall of the Roman empire, which was taking place at the hands of the Vandals.
On Aug. 28, 430, as Hippo was under siege by the Vandals, Augustine died at the age of 76. His legacy continues to deeply shape the face of the Church to this day.
The city of St. Augustine, Fla., is named for the great saint, and this year it is marking its 450th anniversary. St. Augustine's connection to the city and the parish began Aug. 28 – his feast day – in 1565, when Spanish explorer Don Pedro Menendez de Aviles sighted land off Florida's coast. He founded the new colony, St. Augustine, on Sept. 8, the same day the parish was founded.
The Diocese of St. Augustine and its cathedral, the Cathedral Basilica of St. Augustine, recently welcomed a first-class relic of the saint, on loan from the Vatican Treasury for the 450th anniversary celebration of the city and cathedral parish.
The relic is a knucklebone of a finger encased in a reliquary that is the shape of a silver and jeweled crucifix, with the inscription "Pope Pius X, 1904."
It is the first time the relic has been in the United States, and it will be on display for veneration in the Diocese of St. Augustine through Sept. 30.
— CNA/EWTN News, Catholic News Service