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Twenty-Second Sunday of the Year
28 August 2011
Dear Friends in Christ,
Each August the Church’s sacred liturgy remembers two of the most remarkable personalities of the early centuries of Christianity. 27 August is the feast of St. Monica, and 28 August is the feast of her son, St. Augustine — although this year Augustine’s feast is replaced by the 22nd Sunday of the Year.
Almost everything we know about Monica comes from the writings of her son, but he offers a remarkably detailed portrait of his mother. Monica was born in North Africa, probably in the city of Thagaste, in the ancient Berber kingdom of Numidia. By the time of Monica’s birth around A.D. 331, Numidia (modern day Algeria and Tunisia) was part of the Roman province of North Africa, and so Monica and her son were Roman citizens. Monica’s parents were Christians, and she received a careful instruction in the truth of the Gospel and the virtues of Christian living. According to the custom of the time, Monica’s parents chose her husband for her, and she married a man named Patricius, who seems to have been an agnostic of sorts — neither a true pagan nor a believing Christian.
Augustine was born in Thagaste in 354, the first child of his parents. He was a brilliant student, and from earliest years it was clear that he was capable of extraordinary accomplishment. In part because of his academic potential, his parents did not arrange a marriage for Augustine, and this would later lead him to live for fifteen years with a woman who was not his wife and with whom he had a son. At age 16, Augustine was sent to Carthage to study, and he prepared to be a lawyer but then decided to run his own school, first in Carthage and then in Rome. He became fascinated with the strange and heretical philosophy of Manicheism, and for several years he thought of orthodox Christianity as foolish superstition.
Augustine moved to Milan in 385, after sending his mistress back to Africa. There he came under the influence of one of the great Christian teachers of all time: St. Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan. Ambrose taught Augustine the truth of the Gospel and led him to saving faith in Jesus Christ, and at the Easter Vigil of 387, Ambrose baptized Augustine in the Cathedral Church of Milan — fulfilling the prayers of his mother Monica, who had prayed for that moment for thirty years. After several more months in Italy and Monica’s death in the Roman port at Ostia, Augustine returned to North Africa, and in 391 he was ordained to the priesthood for the Diocese of Hippo. Four years later, Augustine became the Bishop of Hippo, and for 35 years he exercised one of the most remarkable ministries of teaching in the history of the Catholic Church. Read his spiritual autobiography “Confessions” to learn more about Saints Monica and Augustine.
Father Newman