Santa Monica

I’m not familiar with the city, great as it may be. But I have long admired and honored the great woman after whom it was named.

Saint Monica, mother of the great Saint Augustine.

What an awesome example she is, of patience, endurance and faith.

She was married young to a government official, Patricius, who was not a Christian, and had a bad temper, though she bore her burdens patiently, and their life together was relatively peaceful. Three children were born to, Augustine, Navigius, and a daughter, Perpetua.

Augustine was a real problem, for a long time.

Augustine, the eldest son, though brilliant, was, according to his own account, a lazy and dissolute youth whose bad behavior caused his mother much grief ­ especially so after he went away to school at Madaura and to Carthage. Although Patricius became a Christian not long before he died, Augustine persisted in his pursuit of pleasure, and, as a nineteen-year-old student, joined the heretical Manichaean sect. When he began to spout heresies, Monica became alarmed, and intensified her efforts to bring him to Christ.

Some things never change… 

During this anguished period of prayer for her son, Monica consulted a bishop who had himself been a Manichaean before he became a Christian. He declined to intervene with Augustine, whom, the bishop correctly observed, was not open to hearing the truth.

How many parents can relate to that? 

She persisted tearfully, but he refused to intervene. Nevertheless, the bishop consoled Monica that “the child of those tears shall never perish”, which she took as a sign from God. Though he continued in his heresies for nine years, Monica followed Augustine to Rome and then to Milan in an effort to rescue her son from his errors. In Milan she met Ambrose, who helped lead Augustine into the true faith.

So……Never lose hope.