Tuesday, 8/27/13
Today we honor Monica, the patron saint of long-suffering
mothers. Though baptized at birth, she was handed over in marriage to a
cantankerous mother-in-law and to her son Patricus, who was a pagan with a hot
temper and wandering ways. Monica bore him three children, with the oldest of
them being the clever Augustine. She enrolled her son as a catechumen, and she had
him half way towards being baptized, when his father Patricus, seeing the
intellectual Augustine as a good investment, set him up as in the city of
Carthage as a student in Rhetoric.
Rhetoric is the art of persuasive speech. Before advertising
came along as a major occupation, rhetoricians were employed as speech-writers by
men pleading their cases before monarchs.
As part of setting up Augustine, Patricus bought a
seventeen-year-old girl to tend to all his son’s needs. Augustine still had
spiritual interests, but he became quite attached to his live-in servant girl. With his physical
enthusiasms warring with his spiritual
interests, he enrolled in the Manichaean Religion that honored separate creators
of human bodies and souls.
Disgusted with her son’s duplicity, his mother Monica had
nothing to do with him for a time; but taking her anguish to prayer, she came
away feeling she should stay as close as she could to her straying son. At home, her goodness was rewarded with her seeing the baptism of both her husband and
her mother-in-law.
Those two passed away when Augustine was twenty-nine, then, without telling her about it, he slipped away to write speeches for senators in
Rome. Seeking him there, Monica learned that for better money he had gone on to
Milan where the emperor had taken up permanent residence.
Following Augustine to Milan, Monica found great delight in
the cathedral sermons of the bishop, who was St. Ambrose. That had her pleading
with her son to listen to Ambrose for pointers in his line of persuasive
speech. Succeeding at last, she was given the joy of seeing Augustine brought
to the love of God by the wonderful words of Ambrose.
Augustine wrote of Monica’s dying after telling him, “Son,
all my hopes in this world have now been fulfilled.”
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