Saint Monica and Saint Augustine: The Son of Those Tears

Saint Monica and Saint Augustine: The Son of Those Tears

Imagine standing on a beach at Carthage in the year 383.

Your son is twenty-eight. He has spent nine years in a religion that denies almost everything you believe, lives with a woman he has never married, and is about to sail for Rome to teach rhetoric to the sons of senators.

You have told him you will not go home without him. So, he tells you there is a friend he cannot leave until the wind turns, and asks you to wait out the night in the little oratory beside the ship. You do what he asks, and he sails while you are on your knees.

He wrote it down himself, as a bishop, fifteen years later, and did not soften it. He invented the friend and the wind to be rid of her, and then set down one line that has not lost its sting in sixteen centuries: he lied to his mother, and such a mother (Confessions, Book V, chapter 8).

Her name was Monica. She had prayed for that son ten years by the night he left her on the shore, and she would pray four more. At the end of it he was a Catholic, and one of the greatest Doctors of the Church.

What she was actually afraid of

Augustine was nineteen when he fell in with the Manichees, and he stayed nine years (Confessions, Book IV, chapter 1). This was not a phase of doubt. It was a rival religion with its own bishops and its own scriptures, and it taught him that the God of the Old Testament was a monster.

Monica understood what that meant. Augustine says she wept for him more than other mothers weep for children who have died, and that wherever she knelt she watered the ground under her face (Confessions, Book III, chapter 11). For a time she would not let him eat at her table, because she could not sit and listen to him blaspheme.

This is the part modern retellings file down. Monica was not an anxious mother whose son had drifted from Mass. She believed he was going to be lost forever, and she behaved accordingly.

What the bishop told her

A dream opened the table to him again. She had seen herself on a wooden plank, weeping for the ruin of her son, and a young man in a great brightness told her to look, and there was Augustine on the plank beside her. When he tried to twist it, saying it must mean she would one day become what he was, her answer came at once: the young man had not said she would be where her son was, but that her son would be where she was. Augustine admits it shook him more than the dream (Confessions, Book III, chapter 11).

She also kept going to the clergy, wanting somebody to refute him. One bishop refused, saying Augustine was too pleased with the novelty of the thing to be argued out of it and would find the error himself by reading.

Monica asked again, weeping. And the bishop, worn down at last by a woman who would not go away, told her to go home, and said that it was not possible that the son of those tears should perish. She took it, Augustine says, as though it had come from heaven (Confessions, Book III, chapter 12). She had no guarantee, no date and no evidence. She had one exasperated line from a tired bishop, and she built the rest of her life on it.

Ten years, then four more

The night at the harbour did not stop her. She got on the next ship. Augustine says she followed him over sea and land (Confessions, Book VI, chapter 1), and found him in Milan at the deepest point of his despair about ever finding the truth. Milan is where it turned, through the preaching of Saint Ambrose.

Then, in a garden in the late summer of 386, he heard a child next door singing something over and over, take it up and read. He opened Saint Paul, read the first passage his eye fell on at the end of the thirteenth chapter of Romans, and it ended for him there (Confessions, Book VIII, chapter 12). He was baptised at Easter in his thirty-third year, with his friend Alypius and with Adeodatus, the son he had fathered outside marriage.

Fourteen years after she began, Monica had what the bishop had promised her.

The window at Ostia

They set out for Africa together and stopped at Ostia to wait for a ship. There, alone at a window over the garden, mother and son talked about what eternal life would be like, and Augustine gives Monica the last word. She no longer had any pleasure in anything here, she said. One thing had made her want to stay a little longer, and that was to see him a Catholic Christian before she died. God had granted it more abundantly than she asked. So, what was she still doing here? (Confessions, Book IX, chapter 10)

Five days later she went down with a fever.

At one point she lost consciousness. When she came back, she looked at her two sons standing over her and asked where she was. Then, seeing their faces, she said that this was where they would bury their mother.

Augustine kept quiet. His brother did not, and said something about how it would be better for her to die at home than abroad. She stopped him with a look, turned to Augustine and said, of his brother, listen to what he says. Then this, to both: lay this body anywhere, and do not let the care of it trouble you. All she asked was that they remember her at the altar of the Lord, wherever they were (Confessions, Book IX, chapter 11).

This mattered more than it sounds. Monica had spent years arranging and paying for a grave beside her husband in Africa, and had wanted it said that after all her wandering across the sea the two of them lay together at the end. She gave it up without mentioning that she was giving it up. Asked whether it frightened her to be left so far from home, she said nothing is far from God, and He would not be at a loss at the end of the world for the place to raise her from.

She died on the ninth day of that fever, in her fifty-sixth year. Augustine was thirty-three. He closed her eyes himself.

And then he did not cry. He forced it down, because weeping would suggest she had died unhappily, and she had not. He sat through the funeral dry-eyed, went to the baths afterwards because somebody had told him bathing drives sorrow out of the mind, felt exactly the same, slept, woke with a hymn of Saint Ambrose in his head, and finally, alone, let himself weep for his mother (Confessions, Book IX, chapter 12).

The only thing she asked for

Monica asked for one thing on her deathbed. Not the grave she had paid for, not to be taken home. She asked to be remembered at the altar.

Ten years later, writing the Confessions as Bishop of Hippo, Augustine reached the end of the book about her and stopped addressing God. He addressed his readers instead, asking that everyone who read those pages remember his mother Monica at the altar, and her husband along with her. He was writing to anyone who would ever pick the book up. That request has been open since about the year 400, and it is open to you.

The mothers and grandmothers of this country

There is a woman in most Australian parishes who comes to Mass on her own and used to come with her children. She has grandchildren who are not baptised, and a son who was confirmed and has not been inside a church since except for a wedding. She has stopped raising it, because raising it costs her the phone calls. So, she prays, says nothing, and comes to Mass on her own.

That woman is not a lesser version of Saint Monica. She is in the same position, and usually the better one. Monica’s son was not lapsed. He was in a heretical sect, arguing publicly against the Church, and willing to lie to his mother’s face to get on a boat without her. It took fourteen years.

And Monica never won the argument. The bishop she pestered was right, and Augustine came to the truth by reading, years later, in a garden in another country. What Monica did was refuse to stop praying and refuse to go away.

This is what Our Lady asked for at Fatima. Not clever answers. Prayer and sacrifice offered for sinners, because so many souls are lost with nobody praying for them. Monica is what that looks like when one woman keeps it, for one soul, for fourteen years, without ever being told it is working.

What you can do

Have Saint Monica remembered at Mass. It is the only thing she asked anybody for, and it is still being asked.

Choose one person by name and pray a decade of the Rosary for them, and keep on past the point where it stops feeling like it is doing anything. That is where Monica spent most of her fourteen years.

Read Book IX of the Confessions. It is short, it is a mother’s death written by her son, and nothing since has improved on it.

Keep the First Saturdays, as Our Lady asked at Fatima, for the conversion of sinners.

When the day costs you something, offer it in the words Our Lady gave the children: O Jesus, this is for love of Thee, for the conversion of sinners, and in reparation for the sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

A prayer

The collect of her feast asks for exactly what she was given, and it names them together:

O God, the comforter of the sorrowful and the salvation of those who hope in Thee, who didst mercifully receive the loving tears of blessed Monica for the conversion of her son Augustine: grant us, by the intercession of them both, to grieve for our sins and to find the pardon of Thy grace. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.

Saint Monica, pray for us.

Saint Augustine, pray for us.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

References

1. Saint Augustine, Confessions, translated by E. B. Pusey (Oxford, 1838)
2. Confessions, Book III, chapters 11 and 12 (Monica's dream, and the bishop's reply); Book IV, chapter 1 (the nine years among the Manichees); Book V, chapter 8 (the departure from Carthage); Book VI, chapter 1 (following him to Milan); Book VIII, chapter 12 (the garden at Milan); Book IX, chapters 10 to 13 (Ostia, her death, and his request that readers remember her at the altar)
3. Romans 13:13 to 14, Douay-Rheims
4. Collect for the feast of Saint Monica, 4 May, Roman Missal (1962). Her memorial is kept on 27 August in the current calendar
5. The prayer given by Our Lady at Fatima on 13 July 1917, in Sister Lucia, Fatima in Lucia's Own Words
6. Image: Ary Scheffer (1795 to 1858), Saints Augustine and Monica. Detail. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last updated: 27 August 2026 09:36

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