On Aug. 27, the Catholic Church and the Church of England celebrate the feast day of St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine. The following day is Augustine's own feast day, celebrated not only by the Catholic Church and the Church of England, but also by the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
Most of our information about Monica comes from Book IX of her son's Confessions. Her husband (and Augustine's father) was an exceedingly difficult person, given to fits of temper, heavy drinking and marital infidelity. Monica's suffering was compounded by the fact that her mother-in-law lived with them in the same house.
Augustine noted that his mother's patience eventually won both his father and grandmother over to her side. His father was baptized a year before his death, and one assumes that the mother-in-law mellowed over time.
Monica had to exercise the same forbearance toward Augustine himself. When she realized that he was not yet ready for conversion to Christ, she turned to prayer, fasting, and vigils.
Augustine, however, took off for Italy to advance his career as a teacher, but without informing his mother. He was accompanied by his female companion of many years and their son, stopping first in Rome for a year and then continuing on to Milan, the seat of the imperial court, where he had been offered a professorship of rhetoric.
Monica followed him to Rome and then to Milan, where she was befriended by its famous bishop, Ambrose. He would later assist Augustine in his conversion to Christianity, after a protracted dalliance with Manichaeism, a religious sect that renounced many of life's ordinary pleasures.
Augustine rejected his mother's subsequent plans for his marriage to an heiress and decided instead to remain celibate, having separated from his long-time companion.
Following his baptism in the year 387, Augustine, along with Monica and a few friends, set off for North Africa, but Monica died on the way, at Ostia, on the Italian coast. She is reported to have said to Augustine before her death that she had fulfilled her own life's purpose in seeing him converted and baptized.
In 1450 her remains were transferred from Ostia to Rome, where they rest today in the church dedicated to her son. For obvious reasons, she is the patron saint of mothers and of alcoholics.
Augustine lived more than 40 years after Monica's death, becoming in the process one of the Church's most distinguished theologians and one of its greatest bishops.
He had returned to North Africa after yet another year in Rome, settling first in Carthage and then in Tagaste, his mother's birth-place, where he established a quasi-monastic community of educated laymen on his family's estates.
During a subsequent visit to the port city of Hippo, he was deeply touched by a sermon given by the aged bishop Valerius, who spoke of the urgent need for a priest to serve the city. Augustine was recognized in the congregation and acclaimed by the other worshipers. The bishop ordained Augustine, but allowed him to continue his monastic life, providing him a house near the city's church.
Four years later, as Valerius' health continued to deteriorate, Augustine became Hippo's coadjutor bishop. Soon thereafter, the old bishop died and Augustine assumed full pastoral responsibility. He remained the bishop of Hippo for the rest of his life (the present-day custom of a bishop's moving from one diocese to a larger one was explicitly prohibited).
Although most of Augustine's time was occupied with the normal duties of a bishop (preaching, administering sacraments, care of the poor, presiding over synods and councils), he continued to live in community with members of his clergy. He also did a fair amount of traveling, making twenty to thirty trips to Carthage, which required nine days each way.
In spite of these extraordinary demands upon his time and energy, he produced a number of major works, including his Confessions, his sermons and commentaries on Scripture, his treatise on the Trinity, and his classic work, The City of God. And all this without a typewriter, much less a computer.
Only on the matters of predestination, sexual intercourse in marriage, and the relationship of Church and state was his thinking inconsistent with the subsequent teaching of the Church. (For more details, see my Lives of the Saints, p. 352.)
Augustine died on August 29, 430, during the 14-month-long siege of Hippo by the Vandals. Unlike his mother, his cult was early and widespread.
Augustine is one of the four original Doctors of the Church, along with Ambrose, who had facilitated his conversion, Jerome and Gregory the Great. Fr. Richard McBrien is the Crowley-O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.
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