Patron Saint of Mothers
St. Monica, feast day 27 August
St. Monica is the patron saint of mothers, particularly those praying for a child who has left the faith, with her feast on 27 August. St. Gerard Majella is invoked by expectant mothers and St. Anne as the mother of Mary. AngelGuard publishes her story.
Quick facts
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.
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 27 August. Her feast falls the day before her son’s, on 28 August, and that ordering is deliberate: the Church puts the one who prayed before the one who was prayed for.