Saint Monica

Amidst this sweet radiance of nascent virtue, one saw, however, appear in Saint Monica one of those slight shadows that God sometimes permits to make His Saints more vigilant and more humble. She had been tasked with going to the cellar every day to fetch the supply of wine. Now, it sometimes happened that after lowering the vessel to fill it, she would bring it to her lips, not out of a love for wine, for it even inspired a certain repugnance in her, but out of that playfulness and gaiety of youth that delights in forbidden things. But, as by despising small things one falls little by little into greater ones, it came to pass that the quantity of wine she took increased every day, and her aversion to this liquor diminished in proportion. God, however, watched over Monica, and used, to correct her, a servant who was the daily and complacent witness of her fault. One day, while arguing with her young mistress, she reproached her for this defect and called her: "Wine-bibber." Pierced by this dart, Monica blushed, and recognizing the ugliness of her sin, she condemned herself severely and corrected herself of it forever. This fault had the happiest results for the pious young girl: it brought a first tear of repentance to her eyes, inspired in her a taste for mortification, and made her humble and distrustful of herself.

Along with supernatural gifts, natural gifts developed in Saint Monica. Her mind was just, elevated, and penetrating; she had an insatiable thirst for learning. To these gifts of the intellect were joined even better ones: an inexhaustible sweetness with a rare firmness; a peace that nothing ever altered, with infinite fire in the soul and decisiveness in the will. Her character was at once constant and bold; her heart, of extreme sensitivity, was inclined toward tenderness, and yet full of energy in love and action.

As for external gifts, Monica increased their charm even further with the most amiable modesty. As she already knew the value of simplicity, and the difficulty of maintaining a mortified heart ready for sacrifice beneath luxurious clothing, she refused with a gentle firmness the precious and perfumed fabrics in which one would have wished to see her dressed.

Thus passed the early childhood of Saint Monica, like a beautiful dawn announcing a more beautiful day. She was already emerging from adolescence and entering youth when she was asked in marriage. Her parents consented, and, by an incomprehensible design of God, this young virgin, this holy and lovable child who, at the very least, seemed predestined for a happy union, was given to a man who seemed little worthy of aspiring to the honor of such an alliance. Patricius was from Tagaste, w here he Patrice Husband of Saint Monica, a curialis of Thagaste, a pagan converted on his deathbed. held the office of curialis. He was a pagan by religion, indifferent, and without principles; he was violent, quick-tempered, and of loose morals. Patricius, however, had a heart greater than his fortune, and we shall see these qualities gradually develop under the delicate hand of the angel whom God gave him as a companion.

Faith and the love of God sustained Saint Monica. Until now, she had only known the peace of a Christian home. She did not suspect what those family interiors were like where God does not preside and where passions, unchained, turn life into a storm. Her mother-in-law was still living; a pagan like Patricius, she also resembled him in temperament and character: she was an imperious, violent, shrewish, and jealous woman. The servants were worthy of both of them: they indulged in slander against their young mistress.

Each day revealed to Monica the abysses that separated her from Patricius. He understood nothing of the life of his holy companion. Her prayers wearied him; her almsgiving seemed excessive to him. He found it strange that she wished to visit the poor and the sick, and that she loved the slaves. This was, for Saint Monica, her life, or rather her daily suffering. She would have resigned herself to it, if at least the purity of her heart had encountered no peril. From the very first days, so young still, and above all so innocent, she glimpsed with astonishment all the weaknesses that exist in a man's heart that the grace of Jesus Christ has not touched. But this sight did not cause her courage to fail. Instead of becoming dejected as so many Christian women do, and especially instead of moving away from the conjugal roof, lifting her heart higher, Monica understood that God had not sent her this poor soul so that she might abandon it; but that, on the contrary, He had entrusted it to her so that she might try to heal, convert, and illuminate it.

To win her husband to God, she employed neither speech, nor argument, nor reproaches. Instead of preaching virtue, she practiced it. She strove to be gentle, humble, patient, modest, and devoted; certain that if, instead of putting truth on her lips, she managed to put it into her life, there would come a day when Patricius would not be able to resist it and would yield to a light so gentle, so discreet, and so true. She saw well the weaknesses and infidelities of her husband; but she never said a single word to him about them. She suffered in silence. She wept when he was absent; she ardently solicited for him faith and divine love, the only things capable of making men chaste.

She observed the same silence of gentleness, humility, and discretion, of true love, when he fell into his fits of rage. She waited for this fury to pass; and then, taking advantage of the return of reason, and of those moments of tenderness when men, violent but affectionate as Patricius was, seek to make those who have suffered from their outbursts forget them, she would say to him confidentially, with great delicacy, and when she was alone with him, a few words of explanation and even of tender reproach, which were almost always well received.

This method of gentleness, this secret of silence and self-denial, she advised to all her friends; and when they, bruised in the face and dishonored by the violence of their young husbands, came to complain to her: "Blame your own tongue," she would say to them pleasantly. And one felt well that she was right; for although her husband was more violent than anyone, he never struck her. She could sometimes see him leap with anger and threaten; he never went any further; with her gentle gaze she always restrained him. This gentleness, this delicacy, this devotion carved

VIES DES SAINTS. — TOME V. 20

into the soul of Patricius, without his knowledge, a furrow whose depth he would only know later. His love, for even in the midst of his outbursts and his weaknesses he loved Monica, was transformed imperceptibly. He acquired elevation and nobility, and a feeling of respect of which he had never had any idea.

Undoubtedly, there was a long way to go from there to a change of morals, to a complete conversion. But Monica learned every day, in prayer, how souls are redeemed; she had an absolute confidence in God, an indomitable hope in His help, with such a certainty of obtaining it, that nothing was ever capable of discouraging her.

It was in the midst of these sad, early, and still very vague and distant hopes that, to console Monica, to attach her to Patricius despite his infidelities, and to make bearable and even dear to her this home where she had so much to suffer, God allowed her to taste for the first time the greatest happiness that perhaps exists here below, after that of dedicating oneself entirely to Him: she became a mother, and, still in the flower of her youth, she saw three little children successively hang upon her neck and begin to smile at her tears.

The first she received from the hands of God was this son, forever famous under the name of S aint Augustine saint Augustin Father of the Church and spiritual master of Possidius. . It is said that, while she carried him, she had a revelation of the wonders of which he would one day be the instrument, if she knew how to keep him faithful to God.

The second was named Navigius. A gentle and pious child, he was until the end, and especially during the sad deviations of Augustine, the tender consoler and faithful guardian of his mother. She also had a daughter, to whom it is believed she gave the name of one of the most popular Saints of Africa, Saint Perpetua, the famous martyr of Carthage.

Monica would have been, if not happy, at least consoled in receiving this little family from God, had not a sorrow, more bitter than anything she had yet known, come to mingle with her joys and finish poisoning her life. Patricius was more and more dominated by his sad weaknesses. Neither the beauty of the mind and heart of his holy wife, nor the tenderness and strength of the affection she had vowed to him, nor the successive birth of three little children, had been able to chain this light soul, and, despite the supplications and tears of Monica, he began to flaunt his disorders. How can one paint what a Christian woman, a wife, a mother suffers then? It is that martyrdom of the soul of which Saint Ambrose spoke, which, because it is accomplished in the secrecy of the domestic hearth, is neither less atrocious nor less heart-rending than the martyrdom of the body.

Abandoned in the flower of her youth, betrayed by the father of her children, Monica, who saw, after four or five years of marriage, the hopes she had cherished from the first days vanish, redoubled her fervor and confidence in God, and, without changing any of her habits of silence, discretion, and gentle and patient waiting toward her husband, even perfecting them, she turned entirely toward her children.

But, however tender the care given by Saint Monica to her children, this was only the prelude to the great work with which she felt herself charged by God. What was needed above all and as quickly as possible was to form the conscience of Augustine. The hour would soon come when, from his mother's lessons, he would pass to his father's examples; when, from the heart and bosom of Monica, he would fall into a society that was deeply corrupt and skillfully corrupting. Thus, to form this conscience, Monica constantly placed before her child's eyes the great principles of the faith, the vivid and pure lights of the Gospel. And in these vivid and pure lights, there is one she loved to transmit to him as a treasure she had received from her ancestors: it was the contempt for the earth, the disgust for what is finite, limited, perishable. She spoke to him constantly of the love of God, of the manger where He had descended, and where He had made Himself poor and a slave for us; of the cross where He had climbed all bloody, in order to give us the measure of His love. To put the final touch on her son's conscience, Monica strove to inspire in him a horror of evil, a hatred of everything that defiles and degrades the heart. And, with that self-denial of mothers who do not fear to humble themselves to preserve their children, she confessed even her own faults to him.

It is thus that she formed the soul of Augustine little by little, that she put into it depth, tenderness, delicacy, and uprightness; that she finally fashioned for him this conscience of which he could never rid himself.

Augustine was still only a catechumen when an illness suddenly came to lead him to the edge of the grave. His mother ran, worried, rushing about, crying out for baptism for her child who, pressed by horrible sufferings, thought however only of God, of his soul, of his eternity. Patricius let Saint Monica do as she pleased, because he was too much a man of honor and at the same time too generous to hinder, on the edge of the grave, the freedom of conscience of his child, and to add to the heart of Monica, to the bitter pain of losing her Augustine, the pain, a thousand times more bitter, of seeing his eternity exposed and his salvation compromised. But as soon as the danger had ceased, the indifferent and the pagan reappeared in Patricius, and he signified his will that the baptism be postponed to a later time.

Monica did not insist; for, with Patricius, she knew it only too well, there was no point in insisting. She only felt that she was contracting an obligation even stricter than in the past to watch over the soul of her son. Warned by the danger he had just run, she resolved not to lose sight of him for an instant, and, sacrificing more and more the sad pleasures of the world, she constituted herself his guardian angel and his visible providence. So that nothing would thwart her in this important work, she applied herself with more zeal than ever to employ toward her husband, her mother-in-law, her relatives, and even her servants, that method of gentleness and patience of which we have already spoken, with which she hoped to disarm them all. Indeed, peace soon radiated around her, and her house resembled those sanctuaries whose silence guards the entrances, and which fill with their calm all those who bring their agitations and sorrows there. But it was especially toward her husband that she deployed the industries of her beautiful soul and the riches of her admirable method. He was a pagan, she wanted to bring him back to God; he was a father, she wanted, without his knowledge, to associate him with her work; she wanted at least to obtain that he would not thwart her.

Monica, who knew that later perhaps passions would come and carry the young man away all the more rapidly as he would have the example of his father as an excuse; Monica, we say, who knew how propitious these early times are for forming the heart of a child, did not lose a single day. As one throws beautiful seeds into a garden in the spring, she threw some truth into her son's soul every morning. She succeeded so well that all the objections and all the resistances of Patricius fell powerless before this gentle empire she had taken over her son and which grew every day.

Free thus, finding no more obstacles, or finding fewer each day, she hastened to complete the conscience of Augustine. Her life was summarized more and more in two words: God and her child.

Anxiety would soon mingle with these first joys of a mother. Augustine was barely out of childhood, and already it was necessary to think about having him begin his studies. Saint Monica, who feared that in wanting to form his mind one might deform his conscience or his heart, did not hasten to send him away. She entrusted him to masters who lived in Thagaste. But Augustine showed an insurmountable laziness, a disgust for study that nothing could overcome.

Alarmed by this first appearance of evil in her child's soul, and feeling that for this noble nature another spur than fear was needed, Monica led her son to "servants of God," to "men of prayer," so that they might help him overcome his aversion to study through higher motives. To this defect, Augustine added a pride, a disordered passion for success and praise, and a singular love for games and pleasure.

It was in the midst of these anxieties that our Saint saw herself obliged to separate from her son. Augustine was beginning to grow up, and Thagaste did not offer enough resources for the education of a young man. It was decided to send him to Madaura, the homeland of Apuleius. Monica led and left her son there, after having poured into his heart all the advice along with all the tears that a mother sheds in such a circumstance.

In the meantime, God reserved a consolation for Monica: Patricius took a first step toward religion and the Church. The truth had prevailed, and Patricius had just declared to his pious wife that he was resolved to abjure paganism. With what joy Monica had received this news! Thrilling with happiness, she accompanied him to the church to publicly abjure paganism and make a profession of the Christian faith. Augustine, upon his return to Thagaste, followed them.

But at the moment when Saint Monica began to win over her husband, her son was finishing slipping away from her. She therefore came to find Augustine and began to show him, through her emotion and her tears, what she thought of the sad state of his soul. Often she would take him aside, and, while walking with him, she would say something to him about God, about the faith of his childhood, about the peace and honor of pure hearts, about the ugliness of evil, and about the horror it should inspire in us. But Augustine no longer understood this language.

Monica, filled with anxiety, was soon to be forced to separate from her son again. The holidays being over, she took him to Carthage to continue his studies there. In a city so deeply corrupt, Augustine was not long in falling into the greatest excesses. When Monica learned of her son's disorders, her grief was so profound that one might have feared she would succumb to it. Her tears flowed day and night. She no longer even knew how to contain them in public. There were days when, upon returning from the holy sacrifice, the place she had occupied was completely bathed in them.

The Church has instituted, on May 4, in honor of Saint Monica, a feast that could be called the feast of the tears of a Christian mother. Here is the tone and manner in which it is celebrated:

Ant. 1. — She wept and she prayed assiduously, this mother, in order to obtain the conversion of her Augustine.

Ant. 2. — O blessed mother, who were one day to be heard according to the immensity of your desires! In the meantime, she wept day and night, this afflicted mother, and she prayed ardently for her son.

Ant. 3. — There she is, this widow who knows how to weep; she who shed such constant and bitter tears for her son.

Ant. 4. — They have raised their voices, Lord; they have raised their voices, these rivers of tears that fell from the eyes of this holy mother.

Ant. 5. — She wept without measure, this inconsolable mother...

The entire office continues in this tone and reveals to us in this admirable mother a grief for which there is no second example in the history of the Church.

One thing, however, sustained our Saint here; it is that she was no longer weeping alone. Patricius, by associating himself with her faith, began to associate himself with her tears. Soon he fell ill, asked for and received baptism with great fervor. After which he fell asleep in a Christian manner and in peace, assisted by the angel whom God had given him as a wife, and who, by dint of gentleness, patience, tender devotion, and courageous sacrifices, had brought him back from so far and returned him to God.

After the death of Patricius, the beautiful aspirations of Saint Monica's soul, hindered and compressed during her marriage, finding no more obstacles, one saw her rapidly rise to the most heroic of virtues. Through a sentiment of touching fidelity to the memory of her husband, she swore in her heart that she would have no other mortal spouse. To the mourning for Patricius, which she bore all her life, was added the mourning of a mother who sees the soul of her son perish and who, to save it, can only pray and immolate herself for him. So that her tears might become more powerful and her prayers equal to the need Augustine had of them, she shut herself up in solitude and devoted herself more entirely than ever to silence, to the hidden life, to devotion, to all miseries, and above all to the pure and generous love of God. From then on, her fasts were frequent and rigorous. Her time was devoted to the service of the poor, whom she fed and dressed with her own hands. She visited hospitals, spent long hours at the bedside of the infirm, and buried the dead. She took the place of a mother to little orphans, raised them as her own children, sometimes took them into her own house, and fed them at her table.

But the most beautiful of all her works, that to which she gave her whole heart, was to console widows and married women. Thus, she employed all her gentleness, her exquisite delicacy, and her profound and luminous spirit in these difficult works. It was at the ever-living and inexhaustible source of love and sacrifice, at Our Lord Jesus Christ present at the holy altar, that she came constantly to refresh and renew herself. Each morning she attended Holy Mass, and, whether at the holy table or in her prayers, God filled her with the most privileged graces. She had the gift of tears.

During this time, along with virtue, faith itself had declined in the soul of Augustine. Monica followed all the progress of the evil with terror, but without becoming discouraged. She had faith in God. However, Augustine, se duced by t Manichéens A sect whose books were burned by Gelasius. he Manichaeans, had just become the apostle of their errors. Who could paint the astonishment and grief of Saint Monica at this unexpected news? The holidays were approaching, and Augustine was going to return to Thagaste. Saint Monica resolved to wait for him.

When Augustine returned to the paternal home, at the first word he let slip about his heresy, Saint Monica stood up indignant. She felt wounded in what was most delicate and profound within her. The love she had for God, the attachment to the Holy Church, her tenderness for a straying son, the fear of seeing him lost forever, the horror of evil, all uniting at once in her soul, inspired in her one of the most beautiful acts of Christian energy of which the history of the Saints has kept a memory. She drove Augustine from her home, declared to him that she would no longer suffer him at her table or under her roof; and, detesting the blasphemies he professed, full of that august anger which invests a mother with such an irresistible authority, she ordered him to leave her house and never return. Augustine lowered his head and left. After his departure, Monica, finding herself a mother again, fell to her knees, let her tears flow, and called God to her aid.

God heard her, for she had a dream that restored some calm to her by restoring her hope. "It seemed to her," says Saint Augustine, "that she was standing on a wooden rule, sad and overwhelmed, when she saw a young man coming toward her, radiant with light, cheerful of face, and smiling at her sorrow. Approaching her, he asked the cause of her tears; but one could see by his manner that he knew it, and that he only questioned her to console her. Monica had replied that she was weeping for the loss of her son: — Oh! replied the young man. Do not worry so. And, pointing to the wooden rule on which she stood, he added: See your child. He is where you are. — She then looked more attentively, and I indeed noticed, beside her, standing on the same rule."

Deeply moved, Monica ran to find her son and told him of the dream she had just had. Augustine tried to interpret it to his advantage. "No, no," replied the Saint, "he did not say: Where he is, you will be; but: He will be where you are." Full of hope, Monica allowed her son to resume his place in the house and at the paternal table.

Saint Monica avoided all discussion with her son, but sought everywhere for men who had enough authority and talent to be listened to by him. One day, she learned of the arrival in Tagaste of a venerable and learned bishop. Monica ran there trembling with hope, firmly persuaded that her vision was about to be realized. But the holy bishop told her, shaking his head, that the time had not yet come. "Leave him," he added; "only pray much." As Saint Monica, melting into tears, pressed him to see her son: "Go, go," the moved bishop said to her, "it is impossible that the son of so many tears should perish."

This word pierced the heart of Saint Monica to the quick. It seemed to her that it descended from heaven. Monica returned home meditating upon it; for this simple word from an old man, joined to the vision she had had, began to appease her a little, by restoring her hope.

This calm was not of long duration: in the meantime, she received a letter from Augustine announcing that he had just decided to leave Carthage to settle in Rome. At this news, Saint Monica felt a terrible tightening of the heart; for to see him leave for Rome with an extinguished faith, a mind drifting with every wind of doctrine, and a soul consumed by passions, was as if she had seen him throw himself into the abyss. Taking her resolve immediately, she decided that Augustine would not leave for Rome, or that she would leave with him, and that, in the peril in which his soul stood, she would not abandon him. She went immediately to Carthage, threw herself on her son's neck, held him violently in her arms, and conjured him with floods of tears not to leave, or at least to take her with him. From then on, she did not want to leave him; but while, overwhelmed by fatigue and emotion, she spent the night in tears, retired in a small chapel dedicated to Saint Cyprian, the illustrious bishop of Carthage, Augustine boarded a ship and moved away from the shore, despite the promise made to his mother. When, morning having come, she left the chapel and found the shore deserted and the ship gone, she became "mad with grief." She wandered on the seashore, filling it with her cries. She accused her son. She complained to God. Finally, exhausted by tears, dejected, at the end of her strength, after having a thousand times accused her son of cruelty and lying, having no way to follow him on the waves, she returned to Tagaste.

Saint Monica, unable to bear it any longer, resolved to go and join her son. She arrived in Rome; but she did not find him there anymore. He had already left for Milan. She therefore left again immediately, full of the same ardor, and sustained, through the fatigues of this second journey, by that same indomitable faith that she would see her son again and that she would convert him.

Hardly arrived in Milan, she went to find Saint saint Ambroise Father of the Church cited for a maxim on strength. Ambrose, who received her with tender joy. He could not tire of contemplating this mother, on whose face the love of God and tenderness for a wayward son had carved such venerable furrows. Their relations were frequent and intimate. Monica, who had learned from Saint Ambrose not to enter into discussion with her son, and who was decided to leave to such a wise man the care of saving him, continued to pray, to remain silent, and to pour out at the foot of the holy altars her all-powerful tears.

Finally, Monica saw the moment arrive for which she had been sighing for so long. Augustine, after seventeen years of resistance, surrendered. Saint Monica could no longer contain her joy; she covered her son with her happy gaze; she watered him with her tears. O happy moment, when a mother finds again her child whom she thought dead, or whom she saw dying! But, O even happier moment, when a Christian mother sees faith, purity, courage, and virtue reborn in the soul of her son; and when, a Christian afflicted by the sorrows of the Church, she foresees that this degenerate son is going to become its light, its glory, and its avenger!

As soon as the holidays began, Saint Monica brought Augustine to the countryside. It was there that both came to hide their joy and prepare their souls for the great day of holy baptism. Some friends had joined them. Saint Monica was the apostle of this little cenacle. All her spirit, all her genius, all her heart, all her faith, all the ardors of her zeal, all the industries of her charity, she employed to second in them the action of God. Saint Monica attended all the conferences of her son with his young friends; she sometimes spoke there, and as God gives to purity and love a singular gift of light, she let fall, in the midst of the conversations, words that Augustine had immediately transcribed on his tablets, and which we are going to collect in our turn to finish knowing through them the mother of the Christian Plato.

"The soul has only one nourishment, which is to know and to love the truth." — "He who desires the good and possesses it is happy. But if he wants evil, even if he should obtain it, how unhappy he is!" — "He who loves and possesses perishable things can never be happy: even if he were sure of never losing them, I would still consider him unhappy, because everything that is fleeting has no relation to the soul of man.

And the more he seeks it, the more miserable and destitute he will be; for all the things of the earth would never make a soul happy."

After six months spent in this intimate and delightful life of Cassiacum, Saint Monica and her son returned to Milan. The moment of baptism having arrived, Augustine went to the church of Saint John the Baptist, accompanied by his mother and his friends. Monica, dressed in the white robe bordered with purple of widows, wrapped in long veils, tried in vain to hide from all eyes the joy that flooded her soul. A ray of peace, of entirely divine security, appeared on her forehead and finished giving to her countenance something celestial.

What had grown most in Saint Monica was love, for her love for Jesus Christ and her love for Augustine were one and the same. They had believed together. She had already experienced some ecstasies in prayer; but since her baptism, they became more frequent. Sometimes she was so intoxicated with her happiness that she would remain an entire day absorbed, without speech, without concern for what surrounded her, enjoying herself inwardly and alone with God. At other times, she would lose even the use of her senses. Since her son's conversion, she thought only of heaven, and it was easy to foresee that she would not be kept here below for long. One day she appeared as if rising from the earth, and, enraptured out of herself, she began to cry out: "Let us fly to heaven, let us fly to heaven." Her face shone with a truly divine joy. From then on, this idea of heaven never left her. Now that she saw her son converted, pious, and no longer needing to be covered by his mother's protection, the idea of heaven constantly took precedence.

As Augustine and his friends were thinking only of returning to Africa, Saint Monica left with them. They arrived at Civita-Vecchia, then at Rome, and finally at Ostia, where they hoped Ostie Episcopal see held by Peter Damian. to find a ship that would transport them all to Africa; but they had to wait a few days. In the meantime, she said to her son: "Nothing now holds me on earth. I no longer know what I have to do here, or why I am still here, since I have realized all my hopes." Five days after this conversation, she was seized by a bout of fever that forced her to take to her bed. She understood that the Bridegroom was calling her, and she thought only of preparing for his coming. While in bed, recollected and praying, she had a rapture, one of those sweet and strong ecstasies that take the soul out of itself, leaving the body motionless and fainted. She was thought to be dead. People rushed around her. They were agitated and looking for remedies to bring her back to life, when she gently opened her eyes. "Where was I?" she said, astonished; and to reveal in one word from what high regions she was descending, and what she had learned there: "You will bury your mother here!" she said.

At these words, Augustine felt tears welling up from his heart; but he had the strength to hold them back. "You will bury my body wherever you wish," she continued. "Do not trouble yourselves about it. It matters little to me. What I ask of you only is to remember me at the altar of the Lord, in whatever place you may be."

From that moment, Monica fell silent, occupied only with gathering her soul to prepare it for the coming of the Bridegroom. She suffered cruel pains; but pain is not an obstacle to the transfiguration of souls. Augustine assisted in silence at this transfiguration of his mother. He did not leave her for an instant; by turns enraptured and broken, he followed with his eyes, he even helped with his prayer, with the vivid impulse of his heart, this marvelous and hard work that was going to release Saint Monica from her earthly shell.

She encouraged him with her gaze: suffering much, but feeling that she was finally arriving, that only one more effort was needed, she thanked him for the support he gave her. Nine days passed in this way, at the end of which the hour of deliverance finally sounded. She prayed in silence, full of faith, detached from everything, happy, feeling that she was going first to a place where Augustine would come to join her, and leaving on her face a reflection of light, joy, and peace.

It is said that at the last moment, as she was asking with more urgent pleas for the Holy Eucharist, which people always thought they should refuse her because of her cruel stomach pains, a small child was seen entering her room who approached her bed, kissed her on the chest, and immediately, as if he had called her, she bowed her head and breathed her last. It was in the year 387, the ninth day of her illness, the fifty-sixth year of her age.

As soon as Monica had expired, Augustine could not bear it. Feeling the waves of an immense sorrow piling up in his soul, stopping by force of energy the streams of tears ready to overflow, he rose, approached the bed, looked for a long time one last time at his mother's face, and after having closed, with a grateful finger, those eyes that had wept so much for him, he fled in haste; for he did not want to sadden with his groans a scene where his Christian heart told him that everything should breathe joy. "I felt," he said, "an immense sorrow flowing into my heart, ready to overflow in torrents of tears; but my eyes, on the imperious command of my soul, swallowed back their current until they remained dry, and this struggle tore me apart." — The body of Saint Monica was carried to the church, where the sacrifice was offered for her before lowering her into the tomb, as was practiced among the faithful.

In the church of Saint-Augustine in Rome, the chapel dedicated to Saint Monica is adorned with frescoes representing her life, or rather all her hopes and joys. She is first seen with eyes wet with tears, yet with a ray of happiness on her brow, listening to an old bishop who announces to her the future conversion of the son of so many tears. Further on, one sees the same figure, drowned in the same sorrow; but the ray of joy is brighter: she is listening to an angel who says to her: Ubi tu et ille, "where you are, he will come," and who shows her in the distance the two united and happy shadows of mother and son. Further still, one sees the tears cease entirely on the Saint's face, and a sweet and pure joy shining in her eyes: this is the moment when Saint Augustine announces his conversion to her. Then Saint Monica appears on her deathbed, radiant, surrounded by her children, holding the hand of the converted Augustine, and expiring with her eyes toward heaven, a smile on her lips. — She is sometimes represented: 1st, carrying a tablet marked with the name of Jesus, to express that it was she who had inspired or merited for her son the love of Our Lord; — 2nd, having near her or in her hand a scarf or girdle; an allusion to a custom of the Hermits of Saint Augustine who distribute blessed girdles under the invocation of Saint Monica.

[APPENDIX: CULT AND RELICS OF SAINT MONICA.]

Saint Monica remained for long centuries in the stone sarcophagus she owed to the piety of her son. Her name was venerated at Ostia, where her body rested, and, after the publication of the Confessions, it was venerated throughout the world. But there is no record of a cult being rendered to her. Her feast is marked neither in the universal martyrologies of Ussard, of Ado, of the Venerable Bede, nor in the special calendars of the Church of Africa.

Around the 6th or 8th century, her body was transported quietly, without ceremony, into the church of Saint-Aurea at Ostia, and finally under the altar, at the back of a vault of which the priests of that church alone held the secret. From the 12th and 13th centuries, Saint Monica began to emerge from the shadows. Her feast was established in several places at once, and wherever it was placed, it was May 4th. Altars were erected in her honor in the old cathedrals of the Middle Ages; hymns were composed in her praise; and, on the frescoes and stained glass windows of the churches, one began to see her beautiful figure shining. Benozzo Gozzoli had already painted some of the most beautiful scenes of her life, and, in particular, her death, in the choir of the church of San Gimignano.

Pope Mart in V cha Martin V Pope who confirmed the tradition by a bull in 1437. rged Peter Assaibizi, a religious of the Order of the Hermits of Saint Augustine, to seek the relics of Saint Monica and bring them to Rome. He went in all haste to Ostia, accompanied by the Blessed Augustine Favorini, Prior General of the same Order, and a large number of priests and religious. The sarcophagus, which contained the venerable remains of our Saint, was opened and the bones it contained were placed in a wooden chest.

When the relics arrived in Rome, a considerable crowd formed a procession for the humble cart that carried them. Everyone wanted to see the chest, to touch it, to kiss it, and the apostolic commissioners, the religious, and the priests of Ostia, who surrounded the cart and formed an escort of honor, could no longer advance. A miracle came to increase the enthusiasm, which knew no bounds. A woman, approaching the cart, applied her sick child against the chest, with a look in which all her faith was painted. And, suddenly, an immense tremor ran through the crowd: the child was healed.

The next day, they returned to Ostia and brought back, in triumph, the sarcophagus in which her body had rested. Several miracles, even more striking, accompanied this translation, which took place in the midst of a crowd that had grown and that nothing could contain.

Martin V proceeded to the translation of the precious remains of Saint Monica into a white marble tomb, adorned with sculptures of great value, due to the piety of Matteo Veggio of Lodi. The head of the Saint was enclosed in a gold reliquary trimmed with crystal. As the church of Saint-Tryphonius was too small to contain the large number of pilgrims who came to implore the Saint, Matteo Veggio of Lodi had a chapel built into which he had her holy body transported. Pope Eugene IV instituted a confraternity of Christian Mothers under the patronage of Saint Monica.

Cardinal d'Estouville, Archbishop of Rouen, had a church built in Rome which he dedicated to Saint Augustine. The body of Saint Monica was placed in a chapel to the left of the high altar, with this inscription:

HIC. JAC. CORPVS. S. MATRIS. MONICE.

At the base of the tomb one reads the following inscription:

IC & XC SEPVLCRVM. VRI. D. MONICE. CORPVS. APVD. OSTIA. TIBERINA. ANNIS. M. XII JACVIT. OB. IN. RO. EDITA. IN EIVS TRANSLATIONE. MIRACVLA. EX OBSCVRO. LOCO. IN ILLVSTRIOREM TRANSPONENDVM. FILII. PIENTISS. CVRARVNT. ANNO. SALVITIS. MDLXVI.

In the 16th century, devotion to Saint Monica did not cease to grow; her name was then inscribed in all the Martyrologies. Her feast began to be celebrated everywhere, and her office was inserted into the Roman Breviary. In 1576, Pope Gregory XIII sent a fragment of her head to Bologna. A portion was granted to the Confraternity of Saint Monica in Rome. A rib was sent to Pavia, and some bones to the Jesuit Fathers of Munster and to the Hermits of Saint Augustine of Trier.

In the 19th century, the cult of Saint Monica flourished. On May 4, 1850, one saw the birth in Paris, in the chapel of Notre-Dame de Sion, of a pious association called the Christian Mothers, who united their pray ers for the conve Mères chrétiennes Pious association placed under the patronage of Saint Monica. rsion of their straying sons or husbands. In 1854, it was established in Lille, Amiens, Nantes, Versailles, Cambrai, Valenciennes, then in Belley, in Fréjus, Toulon, Bordeaux, Tours, Constance, Rouen, Bayeux, Lyon, Orléans, London, Dublin, Liverpool, Stockholm, Saint Petersburg, Odessa, Vienna, Stuttgart, Freiburg, The Hague, Bologna, Turin, Madrid, Chambéry, Florence, etc. In 1855, it extended its branches to Constantinople, Jerusalem, Pondicherry, Mauritius, Africa, Martinique, Sydney, Oceania, Algiers, Geneva, Santiago, Buenos Aires, and the Indies.

This association of Christian Mothers was raised to the dignity of an archconfraternity by an apostolic brief dated March 11, 1856.

Mgr de Las-Cases, Bishop of Constantine, barely seated on the restored see of Saint Augustine, opened two new sanctuaries for the Christian Mothers, one at Tagaste and the other at Hippo.

On May 4, 1872, the solemn translation of a relic of Saint Monica took place at Notre-Dame d'Afrique, which Mgr Lavigerie, Archbishop of Algiers, had recently obtained from Rome: it was the arm bone of the Saint. This distinguished relic and another of Saint Augustine were placed in two large gold reliquaries; after having been exposed to the veneration of all on two kinds of thrones sparkling with light, they were carried triumphantly, then brought back each to its altar. That of Saint Monica is on the right under the great dome.

This Life has been entirely rewritten based on the beautiful History of Saint Monica, by Father Rougand, Vicar General of Orléans. — Cf. Confessions of Saint Augustine, Bollandists, and Breviary of the Canons Regular of the Order of Saint Augustine.