St. Monica Prayer for Wayward Children

For the parent whose son no longer goes to Mass, whose daughter says she does not believe, whose grandchildren have not been baptized. Monica’s story is a reminder that this is not the end of the story. It is also a reminder of what a parent cannot do: argue a child into faith. When she begged a bishop to talk her son out of his errors, he told her to leave him alone for a time and simply pray for him (Confessions III.12). This prayer is addressed to God, and asks St. Monica to pray with you.

Sometimes “wayward” means more than skipping Mass: addiction, a dangerous relationship, a crime, a child who has cut off contact, a child you are afraid for. This prayer is for those nights.

If your son or daughter is in danger, or has spoken of ending their life, please do not carry that alone. Contact emergency services or a crisis line first; then pray:

A novena is nine days of prayer for one intention. Many parents pray it before her feast, beginning on August 18 so that the ninth day falls on August 26, the eve of her memorial on August 27. It can be prayed at any time of year: on a child’s birthday, on the anniversary of their Baptism, or in a week of crisis. Pray each day the prayer below, then an Our Father, a Hail Mary and a Glory Be. There is nothing to publish or pass on, and no promise attached to the ninth day: a novena is a way of asking faithfully, not a formula.

Monica was born into a Christian family in Tagaste, in Roman North Africa, in what is now Algeria, in the early 330s. She was married young to Patricius, a pagan with a violent temper. Augustine records that she never quarreled with him when he was angry, but waited until he was calm to explain herself, and that she won him over to Christ “towards the end of his earthly existence” (Confessions IX.9). They had at least three children: Augustine, Navigius and a daughter, remembered as Perpetua.

Augustine, the gifted eldest, was the child she worried over. As a student at Carthage he had a son outside marriage and joined the Manichaeans, a sect that rejected the Catholic faith. For “nearly nine years,” he writes, he lived in their errors (III.11). Monica wept for him, he says, “more than mothers are wont to weep the bodily death of their children,” and her tears “watered the earth under her eyes in every place where she prayed.”

At one point she refused to let him eat at her table. Then she dreamed she was standing on a wooden rule, grieving, and a young man told her to look: where she was, her son was too. When Augustine tried to twist the dream to mean she would come round to his views, she answered at once that it had said “where you are, there shall he be,” not the other way round (III.11). He admits her answer moved him more than the dream.

The most famous line in Monica’s story is often put in the mouth of St. Ambrose. It was not Ambrose. Augustine says it was “a certain bishop,” whom he does not name, in Africa. Monica begged him to talk to her son and refute his errors. The bishop refused: the young man was not ready to listen, and would find out the error himself by reading; “only pray God for him.” When she kept pleading, in tears, he said, a little exasperated:

“Go your way, and God bless you, for it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish.” (Confessions III.12)

She took it, Augustine says, “as though it were a voice from heaven.”

What came next is a lesson for every praying parent. When Augustine decided to leave Carthage for Rome, Monica begged him not to go and followed him to the harbor. He lied to her, and sailed in the night while she prayed in a chapel of St. Cyprian that he would not leave. God did not grant that prayer. Looking back, Augustine saw why: God “granted not what she then asked, in order to make me what she was ever asking” (V.8). The prayer that seemed refused led, through Rome, to Milan, to Ambrose, and to his conversion.

Monica crossed the sea after her son, comforting the frightened sailors on the way, and found him in Milan, no longer a Manichaean but not yet a Catholic. She told him calmly that she believed she would see him a Catholic before she died (VI.1). Augustine compares himself in those years to the widow’s son at Nain, carried out on the bier of his mother’s grief until Christ would say “Young man, arise” and give him back to her (Luke 7:12–15).

In Milan the bishop was St. Ambrose. Monica obeyed his rules without argument, even giving up her African custom of bringing food and wine to the martyrs’ shrines, and Ambrose, Augustine writes, “would often, when he saw me, burst forth into her praises, congratulating me that I had such a mother” (VI.2). It was through Ambrose, as the old Catholic Encyclopedia puts it, that Monica at last saw her son yield, and in 387 Augustine was baptized in Milan, with his friend Alypius and his son Adeodatus (IX.6).

That same year, waiting at Ostia, the port of Rome, for a ship home to Africa, Monica and Augustine stood at a window looking over a garden and talked about eternal life. She told him she had nothing left to live for: she had wanted to stay in this life only to see him a Catholic Christian, and God had given her more than that. A few days later she fell ill with a fever. Her one request to her sons was this:

“Lay this body anywhere, let not the care for it trouble you at all. This only I ask, that you will remember me at the Lord’s altar, wherever you be.” (Confessions IX.11)

Asked whether she was afraid to die so far from home, she said, “Nothing is far to God.” She died on the ninth day of her illness, in her fifty-sixth year; Augustine was thirty-two. She was buried at Ostia, and in 1430 her relics were brought to Rome, where they rest in the church of Sant’Agostino.

Her feast was long kept on May 4. In today’s calendar St. Monica is remembered on August 27, the day before the feast of St. Augustine on August 28, so that mother and son are honored one after the other.

• Pray more than you argue. The bishop’s advice to Monica was to stop debating and pray. Most adult children already know what their parents believe.
• Keep the table open. Monica once shut her son out; after her dream, she let him back to her table. Love that stays is often the only sermon a child will hear.
• Do not measure God’s answer by your calendar. Monica prayed for years. Some of her prayers were answered by being refused.
• Live your own faith with joy. Augustine saw in his mother a faith that made her patient, generous and unafraid of death. That is what eventually drew him.
• Find other people to pray with you. Monica sought out bishops and priests. In 1850 a group of mothers in Paris formed an association under her patronage to pray together for sons and husbands who had gone astray; it became an archconfraternity in 1856 and spread across the world.
• You are not your child’s savior. Christ is. A parent’s part is to love, pray, and keep the door open. “Love… bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7).