Saint Monica

Mother of Saint Augustine

Feast Day

August 27

Life

332–387

Born

Thagaste, Roman North Africa (modern Souk Ahras, Algeria)

Saint Monica was born about 332 at Thagaste in Roman Numidia (modern Souk Ahras, Algeria), of a Christian Berber family. The principal source for her life is her son's Confessions, especially Book IX, where Augustine has given us perhaps the most extended and personal portrait of any woman in Christian antiquity. Married young to Patricius, a pagan municipal official of Thagaste of harsh temperament, she patiently bore his anger and infidelities and through her gentleness brought about his catechumenate and baptism shortly before his death about 371. She bore him three children: Augustine (354), Navigius, and Perpetua.

Monica's lifelong concern was the conversion of her brilliant son Augustine, who had abandoned the Catholic faith of his catechumenate for nine years of Manichaeism and a relativistic skepticism. She prayed and wept for him so persistently that her local bishop told her, Go, leave me. It is impossible that the son of those tears should perish (Confessions 3.12). When Augustine, tired of her insistence, secretly sailed for Rome in 383 to escape her, she followed him to Rome and then to Milan, where his appointment as professor of rhetoric brought him into the orbit of Saint Ambrose, the great Catholic preacher whose Lenten sermons of 386 (drawn from Origen and the Greek Fathers and applied to the Catholic intellectual public) finally gave Monica's son the way to faith.

Augustine was baptized by Saint Ambrose at the Easter Vigil of 387, his mother present. Setting out to return to Africa, the family stopped at Ostia, the port of Rome. There, in the famous shared mystical experience at the window overlooking the courtyard (Confessions 9.10), mother and son were briefly united in contemplation of eternal Wisdom. Days later Monica fell ill of a fever and died at Ostia about August 27, 387, asking only that her son remember her at the altar of the Lord wherever he might be. Her body was originally buried at Ostia. The relics were transferred to the church of Sant'Agostino in Campo Marzio in Rome in the late fifteenth century by Pope Saint Pius II's successor Pope Martin V (or, by another tradition, Pope Sixtus IV) and remain there.

The Memorial in the General Roman Calendar is observed on August 27, the eve of the Memorial of her son Saint Augustine, in keeping with the principle of mater praecedit filium in their joint liturgical commemoration.