Today in newer, Ordinary Form calendar of the Holy Roman Church is the feast of St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine of Hippo. In the traditional calendar her feast was back in May.
This is the chapel in the church of St. Augustine in Rome where the mortal remains of St. Monica (+387), the mother of Augustine of Hippo now rest.
To the right is a shot of the chapel on the day some years ago when the bones of her son, St. Augustine, were brought from their resting place in Pavia (near Milan) to Rome.
How did St. Monica’s tomb wind up here?
Here is an excerpt from an article I wrote for Inside the Vatican (December 2004) on the above mentioned event. I used the alternate (and more accurate Punic) spelling of the saint’s name – “Monnica” (emphasis not in the original):
Most visitors to the Eternal City find it puzzling and wondrous that Monnica’s remains would be in Rome and even more so that Augustine’s should be in northern Italy, or that we have them at all. How did this come to pass? Monnica died at age 56 of a malarial fever at Ostia, Rome’s port city, not far from where modern Rome’s port, DaVinci airport, is situated.
After Augustine’s baptism in 386 by Milan’s bishop St. Ambrose (+ AD 397), Monnica and Augustine together with his brother Navigius, Adeodatus the future bishop’s son by his concubine of many years whom Monnica had forced Augustine to put aside, and friends Nebridius, Alypius and the former Imperial secret service agent (agens in rebus) Evodius were all waiting at Ostia to return home to Africa by ship. They were stuck there for some time because the port was blockaded during a period of civil strife.
As she lay dying near Rome, Monnica told Augustine (conf. 9): “Lay this body anywhere, let not the care for it trouble you at all. This only I ask, that you will remember me at the Lord’s altar, wherever you be.” She was buried there in Ostia. In the 6th century she was moved to a little church named for St. Aurea, an early martyr of the city, and there she remained until 1430 when her remains were translated by Pope Martin V to the Roman Basilica of St. Augustine built in 1420 by the famous Guillaume Card. D’Estouteville of Rouen, then Camerlengo under Pope Sixtus IV. As fate or God’s directing have would have it, in December 1945, some children were digging a hole in the courtyard of the little church of St. Aurea next to the ruins of ancient Ostia. They wanted to put up a basketball hoop, probably having been taught the exciting new game – so different from soccer – by American GIs. While digging they discovered the broken marble epitaph which had marked Monnica’s ancient grave. Scholars were able to authenticate the inscription, the text of which had been preserved in a medieval manuscript. The epitaph had been composed during Augustine’s lifetime by no less then a former Consul of AD 408 and resident at Ostia, Anicius Auchenius Bassus, perhaps Augustine’s host during their sojourn.
It is possible that Anicius Bassus placed the epitaph there after 410 which saw the ravages of Alaric the Visigoth and the sacking of Rome a
nd its environs. One can almost feel behind these traces of ancient evidence Augustine’s plea to his old friend sent by letter from the port of Hippo Regius over the waves to Ostia.
Hearing of the devastation to the area, far more shocking to the ancients than the events of 11 September were for us, did Augustine, now a renowned bishop, ask his old friend to tend the grave of the mother whom he had so loved and who in her time had wept for her son’s sins and rejoiced in his conversion?
Looking for a great book on Augustine? Try this!
Meanwhile, in here is my relic of St. Monica.
May she pray for us, for widows and for parents of children who have drifted from the Church.
Be sure to pray for the departed. Pray for them! Don’t just remember them. Don’t just think well of them. Don’t just, as the case may be, resent or be angry at them. Pray for them! Prayer for the dead is a spiritual work of mercy.
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Does anyone understand why oh why we had to change all of these feast days, such as St. Monica’s? Is it better information about when they died? Or just tinkering with the calendar for the sake of tinkering? Just another thing to divide the traditional observance with the modern and make it harder to ever achieve the unity that our Holy Father is trying to work toward.
Doesn’t Caravaggio’s beautiful Madonna of the Pilgrims hang in the first chapel on the left just inside that Basilica?
JonPatrick, that bugs me too.
It’s hard to understand how the NO and TLM can be considered different “forms” of the same masses when they don’t even share the same feast days. It would make much more sense to call them both different rites, even if NO were celebrated in TLM spirit, with altar rails, no low altar, etc.
On a past trip to Rome, with several priest friends, we made our way to Ostia Antica to visit the ruins; I had been there before, with the hope that something there would commemorate the Augustine-Monica connection. If it was there, I didn’t find it on the first visit; so on the second, one of my traveling companions located a guide, who met us there and did what she could to fill in the details. She did her best, but it didn’t add much.
Do I understand from your article that the church of Saint Aurea is still there? We managed to miss that! I’ll have to go back!
We were told rather firmly at Mass today that it was the ‘Commemoration of St Monica, Widow’. But it was clearly (OF Latin) not a Commemoration but her ‘Feast’ – as the Collect and Preface and Postcommunion made clear. Maybe only Cl.III, but nevertheless her Feast and hers alone.
(And may she intercede for me, and for all souls who have wilfully wandered away and yet through God’s grace and a parent’s prayers been restored to faith.)
Surely a ‘commemoration’ – even in the OF – means the memorial of a Saint commemorated in a second Collect/Postcommunion on the Feast Day of a Saint who takes precedence of rank. Not the case today.
I could not understand this implied downgrading, and was actually rather indignant – she is the mother of one of the Church’s greatest saints and doctors, a man who is only a saint at all through the intercession of his mother’s prayers and influence. These are vital matters.
Father Z: maybe you have written about this before, but how have you been able to get these relics? Not to inspire envy, of course, but how? Being on the look-out? Begging? right place at right time?
Would that we had more Christian mothers forcing their sons to “put aside” their concubines. Would that we had more Christian fathers whose loving discipline kept their daughters from being modern day concubines! That is what I pray.
I know. I know. Non-judgmentalism is the zeitgeist of our age. But whom am I going to believe, the non-judgmental anything goes crowd or my own lying eyes? I say this as a Baby Boomer fed up with the ravages that “Hurricane Sexual Revolution” has wrought and as someone who has worked in a law office that specializes in divorces, paternity, child support and custody fights.