St Monica and the child who walked away

IWho St Monica was

Monica was born to Christian parents at Tagaste in North Africa in 333. She was married young to Patritius, a pagan with a violent temper, whose mother was of a like disposition. Her sweetness and patience became an example to the wives and mothers of her town, and Patritius was received into the Church shortly before he died. They had three children: Augustine, the eldest, Navigius, and a daughter, Perpetua.

Her patience is rightly honoured, but it is not a rule that any woman must stay where she or her children are in danger; the Church’s own law recognizes grave danger to a spouse or children as a legitimate cause for leaving (Code of Canon Law, canon 1153). If you are afraid of someone at home, call 911 in an emergency, or the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 (text START to 88788), free and confidential, 24 hours a day.

Augustine was brilliant and restless. Sent to Carthage to study, he fell into grievous sin, took up with the Manichaeans, and came home airing their errors at his mother’s table. She drove him from it — and then, moved by a dream, called him back. What follows is told in his own words, from the Confessions he wrote to God after his conversion.

IIYears of tears

Notice what Augustine says she was grieving: not his career, not the family’s reputation, but his soul. She saw, he writes, by the faith God had given her, that her son was dead in soul. Many mothers carry exactly this weight and are told they are making too much of it. Monica would not have agreed.

Her weeping was not idle. She went to a bishop and begged him to talk her son out of his errors. The bishop refused — Augustine, he said, was still unteachable, puffed up with the novelty of his heresy — and gave her counsel that every praying mother should hear:

She kept pressing him with tears, until at last he sent her away with the sentence that made her famous: “Go thy way, and God bless thee, for it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish.” She took it, Augustine says, as though it were a voice from heaven.

IIIWhen God refuses the prayer and grants the person

Years later Augustine resolved to sail for Rome, and his mother was determined to stop him or go with him. He lied to her, pretending he had to wait for a friend. While she spent the night in prayer at an oratory of St Cyprian close to the ship, he slipped away. Here is how he later understood that night:

This may be the most important sentence ever written for a praying mother. Monica’s prayer that night was refused. The ship sailed. And the refusal was the road to the very thing she was always asking: in Italy Augustine met St Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, and there, after long resistance, he yielded to grace and was baptized. God did not ignore her; He answered her deeper prayer by a road she would never have chosen.

IVWhat St Monica teaches a mother whose child has left

• Name the real grief. It is your child’s soul you are mourning, and that is not an overreaction.
• Keep praying, and keep it simple. “For the continual prayer of a just man availeth much” (James 5:16, Douay-Rheims). A daily line said for years outweighs a great effort abandoned.
• Argue less, pray more. The bishop’s counsel — leave him alone for a time, only pray God for him — is not indifference. It is trust that grace can reach where your arguments cannot.
• Stay near. Monica followed her son from Africa to Milan. You may not be able to follow an adult child anywhere, but you can keep your door, your table and your love open.
• Find good counsel. She sought out bishops and found St Ambrose. Talk to a priest you trust; you were not meant to carry this alone.
• Let God choose the road. Some of your prayers may be refused, as hers was that night, without God abandoning the deeper prayer beneath them. He will not force your child’s freedom, but he does not stop seeking: in his own parable the shepherd goes “after that which was lost, until he find it” (Luke 15:4, Douay-Rheims).

Our Lord’s own picture of this hope is a father watching the road: “And when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and was moved with compassion, and running to him fell upon his neck, and kissed him” (Luke 15:20, Douay-Rheims). Be the one who is watching.

VThe end of the story

After Augustine’s baptism, mother and son set out for Africa together. At Ostia, the port of Rome, Monica fell ill. In her last days she told her sons not to worry about where she was buried:

She died there in 387, in the fifty-sixth year of her age, having seen what she had prayed for. Her son is St Augustine. Mothers still ask her help: in 1850 an Association of Christian mothers was founded at Paris under her patronage, to pray for sons and husbands who had gone astray, and it spread across the Catholic world.

VIA prayer to St Monica for a child far from the faith

We could not verify a traditional prayer to St Monica in a public-domain source, so we offer this one, composed for Regina and labelled as such. Pray it daily, and add your child’s name.

If this sorrow is crushing you, the Mater Dolorosa companion has a path for a mother whose child is far from the faith, and the Prayer Journal keeps your intention in front of you each morning — stored on your device unless you choose to turn on sync.