Patron Saint of Mothers

Why St. Monica?

Monica prayed for her son for roughly seventeen years while he did precisely as he liked. He joined a sect she considered heretical, took a mistress, fathered a child outside marriage, and moved from North Africa to Rome partly to get away from her, deceiving her about the sailing to do it. She followed him to Italy. Her son was Augustine, who became one of the towering figures of Christian thought, and who wrote about her at length in the Confessions with an honesty that is still uncomfortable to read. He records both her prayer and her persistence, and he does not pretend she was easy. That is why the patronage is so specific and so widely used. Monica is not the patron of motherhood as an ideal. She is the patron of the mother who has been praying for years with no visible result, whose child is currently a long way off, and who is being told, gently, to be realistic. She is the standing argument against giving up, and she is invoked by more people in that exact situation than almost any other saint. St. Gerard Majella is the traditional intercessor for pregnancy and expectant mothers, and St. Anne, mother of Mary, is invoked more generally.

Who was St. Monica?

Monica was born in North Africa about 331, married a man named Patricius described as bad-tempered and unfaithful, and had three children. The one everyone knows is Augustine.

He left the faith she raised him in, took up with the Manichees, fathered a child outside marriage, and moved to Italy partly to get away from her. She followed. The account in his own Confessions is unsparing about both of them: her weeping, her pursuit, his irritation, and the years in which nothing she did worked.

It took seventeen years. He was baptised at Easter in 387, and she died a few months later at Ostia, waiting for the ship home, saying there was nothing left she wanted to do here. The reason she is patron of mothers is not that she was serene. It is that she was not, and kept going anyway.

The feast: August 27

August 27, the day before her son. The Church put them in that order deliberately, and the pairing is the whole point: Augustine on the 28th is the answer to Monica on the 27th. Many parishes keep a Mass for parents of children who have left the faith on or near the feast.

How to ask their intercession

Ask by name and keep asking, which is the whole content of her example. Many mothers pray a novena to her ending on August 27. Her feast falls the day before her son’s, on August 28, and that ordering is deliberate: the Church puts the one who prayed before the one who was prayed for.