A Novena to Saint Monica
The son of these tears
The Mother of Augustine
The Novena Prayer
Dear Saint Monica, you were once the mournful mother of a prodigal son. Your faithfulness to prayer brought you and your son so close to God that you are now with him in eternity. By your intercession and God's grace, your son Saint Augustine became a great and venerable saint of the Church. Please take my request to God with the same fervor and persistence with which you prayed for your own son, that I may one day praise God for his mercy as you do now. Saint Monica, pray for me, especially for my request during this novena.
Monica is known almost entirely from Books III and IX of her son Augustine's Confessions, written after her death by a man who had given her a great deal to endure and knew it; it is very likely the only surviving biography of a mother written by the child she prayed for.
Patricius
The Novena Prayer
Dear Saint Monica, you were once the mournful mother of a prodigal son. Your faithfulness to prayer brought you and your son so close to God that you are now with him in eternity. By your intercession and God's grace, your son Saint Augustine became a great and venerable saint of the Church. Please take my request to God with the same fervor and persistence with which you prayed for your own son, that I may one day praise God for his mercy as you do now. Saint Monica, pray for me, especially for my request during this novena.
Monica's husband Patricius was unfaithful and had a temper known throughout the town, though Augustine notes that she managed never to be beaten, unlike her friends, whose bruises he mentions as ordinary; Patricius was baptized a Christian a year before his death, after roughly thirty years of marriage.
The Wine
The Novena Prayer
Dear Saint Monica, you were once the mournful mother of a prodigal son. Your faithfulness to prayer brought you and your son so close to God that you are now with him in eternity. By your intercession and God's grace, your son Saint Augustine became a great and venerable saint of the Church. Please take my request to God with the same fervor and persistence with which you prayed for your own son, that I may one day praise God for his mercy as you do now. Saint Monica, pray for me, especially for my request during this novena.
Augustine records that as a girl sent to draw wine from the household cask, Monica began sipping and worked up to drinking whole cups, until a servant, in the middle of an unrelated argument, called her a drunkard; the accusation, however it was meant, was true, and she stopped.
Seventeen Years
The Novena Prayer
Dear Saint Monica, you were once the mournful mother of a prodigal son. Your faithfulness to prayer brought you and your son so close to God that you are now with him in eternity. By your intercession and God's grace, your son Saint Augustine became a great and venerable saint of the Church. Please take my request to God with the same fervor and persistence with which you prayed for your own son, that I may one day praise God for his mercy as you do now. Saint Monica, pray for me, especially for my request during this novena.
Augustine left the Christian faith of his childhood as a teenager for the Manichaean sect, fathered a son outside marriage, and argued against Christianity for close to two decades while his mother prayed.
The Bishop’s Answer
The Novena Prayer
Dear Saint Monica, you were once the mournful mother of a prodigal son. Your faithfulness to prayer brought you and your son so close to God that you are now with him in eternity. By your intercession and God's grace, your son Saint Augustine became a great and venerable saint of the Church. Please take my request to God with the same fervor and persistence with which you prayed for your own son, that I may one day praise God for his mercy as you do now. Saint Monica, pray for me, especially for my request during this novena.
A bishop, worn down by Monica's repeated requests that he personally argue her son out of his beliefs, eventually told her that the son of these tears could not be lost, a remark Confessions records as though it were a turning point, though the bishop may have intended only to end the conversation.
Following Him to Milan
The Novena Prayer
Dear Saint Monica, you were once the mournful mother of a prodigal son. Your faithfulness to prayer brought you and your son so close to God that you are now with him in eternity. By your intercession and God's grace, your son Saint Augustine became a great and venerable saint of the Church. Please take my request to God with the same fervor and persistence with which you prayed for your own son, that I may one day praise God for his mercy as you do now. Saint Monica, pray for me, especially for my request during this novena.
Augustine sailed for Rome without telling his mother the true departure time, leaving her weeping on the shore by his own account; she followed him first to Rome and then to Milan.
She Did Not Convert Him
The Novena Prayer
Dear Saint Monica, you were once the mournful mother of a prodigal son. Your faithfulness to prayer brought you and your son so close to God that you are now with him in eternity. By your intercession and God's grace, your son Saint Augustine became a great and venerable saint of the Church. Please take my request to God with the same fervor and persistence with which you prayed for your own son, that I may one day praise God for his mercy as you do now. Saint Monica, pray for me, especially for my request during this novena.
What Augustine credits with his eventual conversion in Confessions is Ambrose's preaching in Milan, a Neoplatonist text, an account of Egyptian hermits told by a friend, and a child's voice heard over a garden wall telling him to take up and read; Monica does not appear in his account of the decisive scene.
The Window at Ostia
The Novena Prayer
Dear Saint Monica, you were once the mournful mother of a prodigal son. Your faithfulness to prayer brought you and your son so close to God that you are now with him in eternity. By your intercession and God's grace, your son Saint Augustine became a great and venerable saint of the Church. Please take my request to God with the same fervor and persistence with which you prayed for your own son, that I may one day praise God for his mercy as you do now. Saint Monica, pray for me, especially for my request during this novena.
Waiting at Ostia for a ship back to Africa, Monica and Augustine had a shared conversation about eternal life, recorded in Confessions Book IX, after which she told him she had no further reason to want to remain; she died five days later.
Bury Me Anywhere
The Novena Prayer
Dear Saint Monica, you were once the mournful mother of a prodigal son. Your faithfulness to prayer brought you and your son so close to God that you are now with him in eternity. By your intercession and God's grace, your son Saint Augustine became a great and venerable saint of the Church. Please take my request to God with the same fervor and persistence with which you prayed for your own son, that I may one day praise God for his mercy as you do now. Saint Monica, pray for me, especially for my request during this novena.
Monica had arranged for years to be buried in Africa beside her husband, but on her deathbed at Ostia she withdrew the request, asking only to be remembered at the altar of the Lord wherever her children were; she died in 387, and her feast falls the day before her son's.
The prayer above is a traditional novena prayer to Saint Monica, of unknown authorship and long in circulation, given here as it is commonly printed. Everything known of Monica (c. 331–387) comes from Books III and IX of her son’s Confessions — the wine, the bishop’s answer, the harbour at Rome, the window at Ostia and her last request. What follows each day is a fact from her life as Augustine recorded it, one per day.
