Patron Saint of Mothers

Almost everything known about St. Monica comes from her son, and he did not flatter her. In the Confessions St. Augustine tells how she wept over him for years while he followed the Manichees, and how she begged a bishop to talk to him. The bishop refused, saying the young man was not ready, and sent her away with a sentence she held onto: “it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish” (Confessions III.12).

She lived to see him baptised. A few months later, at Ostia, waiting for the ship home to Africa, she fell ill. Augustine records that she died “the fifty-sixth year of her age, and the thirty-third of mine” (IX.11), telling her sons not to worry about where she was buried: “Lay this body anywhere.” The one thing she had wanted in this life, she said, was to see him a Catholic Christian before she died, and God had given it.

Yes, and of grandmothers. St. Anne is the mother of the Virgin Mary and so the grandmother of Jesus. The Gospels do not name her; her name, and the story of her long childlessness and Mary’s birth, come from a second-century writing called the Protoevangelium of James, dated to about the year 150. The Catholic Encyclopedia is plain that it is apocryphal and cannot be accepted as beyond doubt on its own authority. What the Church keeps is the plain fact behind it: Mary had a mother, who raised the child God chose.

Her feast is July 26, kept with her husband St. Joachim. She has long been invoked by women in labour, and she is patroness of Brittany and of Quebec, where the shrine of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré is well known. Mothers ask her help above all as mothers of mothers: for their daughters, and for the grandchildren they help to raise. For Mary’s own motherhood, see Mary, Mother of God.

St. Gerard Majella was born at Muro, south of Naples, in April 1726. He entered the Redemptorists as a lay brother in 1749 and died on October 16, 1755, aged twenty-nine. His short life was full of reported wonders, and of one hard trial: he was falsely accused of a shameful sin, and bore the calumny with such patience that St. Alphonsus Liguori, the founder of the Redemptorists, said of him, “Brother Gerard is a saint.” He was beatified by Pope Leo XIII in 1893 and canonised by Pope Pius X on December 11, 1904. His feast is October 16.

The patronage comes from a story told of him. Visiting a family, he left behind a handkerchief and told a young daughter of the house to keep it. Years later, in a difficult labour, she asked for it, and the child was born safely. From then on mothers asked his prayers in pregnancy, and he became known as “the mothers’ saint.” The story is devotion, handed down; the practice it began is simply a mother asking a saint to pray for her and her child.

St. Gianna Beretta Molla, an Italian paediatrician and mother of four. In her fourth pregnancy a growth was found on her womb, and she chose the surgery that would spare her child rather than the treatments that would have ended the pregnancy. She died on April 28, 1962, a week after her daughter was born. She was canonised on May 16, 2004, and her feast is April 28. Mothers facing a hard pregnancy often ask her prayers.

St. Zélie Martin, who ran a lace-making business while raising her daughters, among them St. Thérèse of Lisieux. She and her husband Louis were canonised together on October 18, 2015, the first married couple canonised as a couple. Working mothers find a patron in her.

The Virgin Mary, above all, whom Jesus gave to the Church from the cross: “Behold, your mother!” (John 19:27). And Lois and Eunice, the grandmother and mother St. Paul thanks for the faith of Timothy: “the sincere faith that is in you, which lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice” (2 Timothy 1:5). The Catechism says the same of every Christian parent: “Parents have the mission of teaching their children to pray” (CCC 2226). For children as they grow, see the patron saint of children.

For your own mother, living or dead, on Mother’s Day or any day. Scripture’s praise of a good mother is in Proverbs: “Strength and dignity are her clothing… Her children rise up and call her blessed” (Proverbs 31:25, 28). For verses to send or read aloud, there are Bible verses for Mother’s Day.

For an expectant mother, or for someone praying for her. Prayer goes alongside good care, never instead of it: keep every appointment, and call your doctor or midwife at once if something feels wrong. Hannah, who prayed for years for a child, said when he came: “I prayed for this child, and the LORD has given me my petition which I asked of him” (1 Samuel 1:27).

For the mother whose son or daughter has gone far off, from the family, from the faith, or from themselves. God speaks to Israel as a mother would: “Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yes, these may forget, yet I will not forget you!” (Isaiah 49:15).

Miscarriage and stillbirth are griefs many mothers carry quietly, often with little said by anyone around them. The child was real, and the grief is real. It is right to name the child, to ask a priest to pray with you, and to take time. If the grief has become more than you can carry, or you are thinking of harming yourself, please reach out to emergency services or a crisis line now.