St. Monica

1. Who Monica Was

Monica was born into a Christian family at Thagaste, a small inland town of Roman North Africa, at a time when the African church was large, literate, quarrelsome and freshly out of persecution. Her name is probably of local Berber origin, and Augustine gives no account of her schooling. She was married young, in the ordinary way, to a man of the town's governing class.

She was not a nun, an abbess, a foundress or a martyr. She kept a house, buried a husband, followed a son across the Mediterranean, and died on the way home. The Church canonised a housewife of the fourth century, and that is the point of her.

2. What the Record Actually Is

There is one substantial source for Monica's life, and it is her son. Augustine describes her throughout the Confessions, gives the fullest account of her in book nine, and mentions her in a few letters and in the early dialogues written at Cassiciacum, where she takes part in the conversation.

That source has obvious strengths. Augustine knew her for thirty-three years, he wrote within about a decade of her death, and he had no reason to invent the parts that make her difficult. He records that as a girl she used to sip wine from the family cellar until a servant, in a quarrel, called her a drunkard and shamed her out of it. He records her deferring to a violent-tempered husband and advising other wives to do the same. He records himself deceiving her and sailing from Carthage to Italy while she prayed in a chapel on the shore, and he records her grief when she found out.

The limits matter too. The Confessions is a work of theology in the form of a prayer, written to display the workings of grace. Monica appears in it as the instrument of her son's conversion, which was her role in his life and is not the whole of a person. There is no independent biography, no dossier of her own words, and no way to check the portrait against anything else. Reading her honestly means reading her through one loving, gifted and interested witness.

3. Her Marriage and Her Household

Monica married Patricius, a modest landowner and member of the town council at Thagaste, who was a pagan for most of their life together. Augustine describes him as generous and hot-tempered and unfaithful, and reports that Monica managed him by silence in the moment and patience afterwards, and that she was never struck, which he presents as unusual among the wives she knew.

Modern readers will find the advice she gave those wives hard to take, and it is better to say so than to smooth it over. Augustine reports her counselling women who came to her with bruises to remember the terms of their marriage contracts and hold their tongues. That is the counsel of a woman in the fourth century with no legal recourse and no shelter to send anyone to. The Church holds up her constancy and her prayer. It does not hold up a fourth-century strategy for surviving a violent husband as a rule for anyone today, and no reader should take it as one.

There were three children who survived: Augustine, born in 354, another son named Navigius, and a daughter whose name Augustine never gives. Patricius was baptised shortly before his death, which happened while Augustine was still a teenager. Monica was widowed in her early forties and did not remarry.

4. The Wayward Son

Augustine was the brilliant one, sent away to school at Madauros and then to Carthage on money the family could barely raise. By his own account he took a concubine at Carthage, lived with her for about fifteen years and had a son by her, Adeodatus. At nineteen he read Cicero and turned to philosophy. Then he joined the Manichees, a dualist religious movement that held matter to be evil, treated the God of the Old Testament as a lesser and cruel power, and offered its followers the flattering promise that faith could be replaced by knowledge.

Monica's reaction to the Manichaeism was fiercer than her reaction to the concubine. She refused for a time to let him eat at her table. She badgered bishops to argue with him. She had a dream in which she stood weeping on a wooden rule and was told that where she was, there he would be also, and when she reported it to Augustine he tried to twist it into a prediction that she would join him, and she answered at once that she had not been told that she would be where he was, but that he would be where she was. Augustine says the reply struck him more than the dream.

Then he left. Determined to teach at Rome, and knowing she would follow or hold him, he told her he was seeing a friend off and sailed at night while she prayed in a chapel by the harbour. She learned in the morning that he was gone. She followed him to Rome, and when he had already moved on to a public teaching post at Milan, she followed him there.

5. "Child of These Tears"

The most quoted line in Monica's story is not hers. Augustine reports that she wore out a bishop with her pleading that he should meet her son and refute him, and that the bishop, who had been a Manichee himself and had reasoned his own way out, finally told her that Augustine would find his own way, and sent her off with the words that it was not possible that the son of such tears should perish.

Augustine says she took the answer as though it had come from heaven. It is worth noticing what the sentence actually promised, which was nothing about a date. She had roughly another nine years of waiting after that conversation. The consolation she received was that the prayer was not wasted, and she was given no schedule.

6. Milan, Ambrose and the Turn

At Milan Monica came under the influence of the bishop, Ambrose, and Augustine says she loved him as an angel of God because she knew he was the one leading her son toward the truth. Ambrose in turn thought well of her, and Augustine reports that the bishop congratulated him on having such a mother.

Two small incidents from Milan are worth keeping. Monica had brought the African custom of taking food and wine to the shrines of the martyrs, and when she found that Ambrose had forbidden the practice at Milan, on the ground that it drifted toward drunkenness and resembled pagan meals for the dead, she stopped without argument. She asked Ambrose whether she should fast on Saturday in the Roman manner or not, as at Milan, and he answered that he followed the custom of whatever church he was in, which is the origin of the proverb about doing as the Romans do.

Both incidents show the same thing about her. She had strong religious habits, and she gave them up on the word of a bishop when the Church's judgment went the other way. Obedience of that kind is easy to overlook next to the tears, and it is a real part of why the Church calls her a saint.

She also arranged a respectable marriage for Augustine, which required sending his partner of fifteen years back to Africa. Augustine records the woman's grief and his own, and does not defend what was done. It belongs in an honest account of the household.

Augustine was baptised by Ambrose at the Easter Vigil in 387, with his son Adeodatus and his friend Alypius. Monica was there.

7. The Vision at Ostia

The family set out for Africa and stopped at Ostia, the port of Rome, waiting for a crossing. Augustine describes standing with his mother at a window looking into the garden of the house, talking about what the eternal life of the saints would be like.

The conversation climbed. They passed over the beauty of bodies, then the heavens, then their own souls, and for one instant, he says, they touched Wisdom, and then sighed and came back to the noise of their own speech. Then Monica said that there was nothing left in this life that she wanted. The one reason she had asked to stay a little longer was to see her son a Catholic Christian before she died, and God had given her that in overflowing measure.

The passage in book nine of the Confessions is one of the most discussed pieces of writing in the Christian mystical tradition. What it describes is a shared experience between a mother and her son, arrived at through conversation rather than through solitary contemplation, and reached by two people who had spent decades arguing.

8. Her Death and Her Last Request

Within about five days Monica fell ill with a fever. She was ill for nine days and died at Ostia, aged fifty-six, in the year 387. Augustine was thirty-three.

Her sons had known she wanted to be buried beside her husband at Thagaste, and she waved it away. Augustine records her telling them to lay her body anywhere and to give it no thought, and asking one thing only, that they should remember her at the altar of the Lord wherever they were.

That request is the clearest statement of Catholic practice for the dead that any fourth-century layperson left behind. It assumes that the Eucharist joins the living and the dead, that the place of a grave is a secondary matter, and that intercession continues after death. The Church's teaching on praying for the dead, set out on our page about purgatory, is the same conviction worked out over centuries. Monica stated it on her deathbed, and her son wrote it down.

Augustine also describes his own grief with unusual candour: he held it in through the funeral, thought he had mastered it, and then wept, and was ashamed of weeping, and then wrote that he was ashamed of having been ashamed. The Confessions ends its narrative of his life shortly afterwards, and he asks his readers to remember his parents at the altar.

9. Why the Church Holds Her Up

Monica is held up for one virtue in particular: perseverance in prayer, sustained over a period long enough to prove that she was not praying for the feeling of it.

Christ commands exactly that. Luke introduces the parable of the persistent widow by saying that Jesus told it to teach them about the need to pray always and not to lose heart (Luke 18:1). The woman in the parable wins because she will not stop coming. In the same Gospel Jesus says to ask, seek and knock, and describes a man who gets bread at midnight because of his neighbour's sheer persistence (Luke 11:5 to 10). Paul reduces it to three words: pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17).

The Catechism treats perseverance as a defining feature of Christian prayer and warns that the great objection is the experience of praying and appearing not to be heard. Monica is the standing counter-example, and she is useful precisely because her answer took so long. Thirteen years of praying for a son who was moving further away, and the answer, when it came, came through a book by Cicero, a disillusioning meeting with a Manichee bishop, a Milanese preacher's rhetoric, and a voice in a garden. None of it looked like an answer while it was happening.

The second thing the Church honours in her is the ordinariness of the setting. She had no vocation beyond her state in life. The Second Vatican Council's teaching that every baptised person is called to holiness, which the Catechism restates as the universal call to holiness (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2013), has Monica as one of its oldest illustrations.

10. Feast Day, Relics and Patronage

Feast day

Monica's memorial in the General Roman Calendar is 27 August, placed immediately before the feast of Saint Augustine on 28 August so that the Church keeps mother and son together. In the older calendar her day was 4 May, and it was moved in the 1969 revision to sit next to her son.

Relics

She was buried at Ostia. Her remains were transferred to Rome in 1430 and placed in the church of Sant'Agostino, near Piazza Navona, where they are venerated today. The Ostia burial site was identified in the twentieth century when part of an early epitaph for her was found there.

Patronage

Monica is invoked by mothers, by wives, by widows, by women in difficult or abusive marriages, by parents of children who have left the faith, by victims of unfaithfulness, and by those who struggle with alcohol, the last of these connected to the story of her girlhood drinking. Prayer groups of mothers meeting under her name exist in many countries. Patronages of this kind grow from long devotional custom rather than from a formal decree, and they are a fair reading of her life.

11. What to Take From St. Monica

• Set no deadline. She prayed for thirteen years past the point where any reasonable person would have concluded it was not working. The instruction is to pray always and not lose heart (Luke 18:1), and it contains no timetable.
• Argue less and pray more, and know which is which. Monica badgered bishops, and the one who mattered told her to stop arguing and keep praying. Her son was eventually convinced by an argument, and it was not hers.
• Obey the Church when it corrects your devotion. She dropped a cherished African custom the moment Ambrose said it had to go. Attachment to a practice is not the same thing as faith.
• Ask to be remembered at the altar. Her last request was for Mass, and the Mass is free. Have one offered for the person you are worried about, and go yourself.
• Begin now. Monica did not know she had less than a year left when she stood at the window at Ostia. Nobody knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32). The conversation you have been avoiding with your son or your daughter belongs to this week.

12. Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. Monica?

Monica was a Christian woman of Roman North Africa, born around 331 at Thagaste in what is now Algeria and died at Ostia near Rome in 387. She married a pagan town councillor named Patricius, raised three children, and prayed for many years for the conversion of her eldest son Augustine, who became bishop of Hippo and one of the most influential writers in Christian history. She lived to see him baptised at Milan in 387 and died a few months later.

How long did St. Monica pray for Augustine's conversion?

Augustine describes his mother weeping and praying over him from the time he joined the Manichees, which he places at about the age of nineteen, until his baptism at thirty-two, a period of about thirteen years. She had been anxious about his beliefs and his way of life for longer than that. The answer, when it came, arrived through a series of events that did not look like answers while they were happening.

Is the story of St. Monica reliable history?

Almost all of it comes from one source, her son's Confessions, written about ten years after her death, together with brief mentions in his letters and early dialogues. Augustine knew her for thirty-three years and included details that reflect badly on both of them, which counts in the account's favour. The Confessions is a work of theology written as a prayer, and Monica appears in it in the role she played in his life, so the portrait is trustworthy and incomplete at the same time.

Who said "the son of these tears shall not perish"?

An unnamed bishop said it to Monica, and Augustine reports it in the third book of the Confessions. She had pressed the bishop to meet her son and refute his Manichaeism, and he refused, telling her that Augustine would find his own way through reading, and dismissing her with the assurance that it was not possible that the son of such tears should perish. Roughly nine more years passed before Augustine was baptised.

When is St. Monica's feast day and what is she the patron of?

Her memorial is 27 August, the day before the feast of Saint Augustine, so that the Church keeps mother and son together. Before the 1969 revision of the calendar she was kept on 4 May. She is invoked by mothers, wives, widows, women in difficult marriages, parents whose children have left the faith, and people struggling with alcohol.

Where are St. Monica's relics?

She died and was buried at Ostia, the port of Rome, in 387. Her remains were transferred to Rome in 1430 and are venerated in the church of Sant'Agostino near Piazza Navona. Part of an early epitaph for her was recovered at Ostia in the twentieth century, which supports the traditional account of the original burial.