August 28, 2025:
Today is the Feast of Saint Augustine, Bishop and Doctor of the church, whose Confessions and City of God remain two of the Church’s most definitive works in explaining personal experience with the Holy Spirit and the Church to lost and fallen world in collapse of the Roman Empire.
Yesterday was the Feast of Saint Monica.
Without Saint Monica, there is no Augustine.
Saint Monica was Augustine’s mother and, beyond the acts of birth and raising until of age of entering into the world, Augustine’s spiritual savior. For thirty years, Augustine lived as man of the world. He wanted nothing of the Church. He was a Manichean: magic, mysticism, and prophesy—apart and away from God; an idolatry he after recognized in City of God as inadvertent worship of demonic deities.
For thirty years, he lived of the world, in his pride, in his vanity, in his affairs and all the rest.
But Monica never stopped praying.
Every day, every night, Monica prayed for the return and salvation of her son.
For thirty years, world mocked, believing prayers unanswered—but all the while, her prayers were compounding to the Heart on Fire her son would become: a Doctor of the Church still returned to, referenced, and pivotal today—beyond world history but in practice and worship of Our Faith.
Without Saint Monica, without her prayers—whose to say what Augustine might have been?
By the grace of God—we’ll never know.
There was an ugly thing that happened on the Feast of Saint Monica this year. A mother worked at a school—it makes no mention if in practice of the faith or simply wanting the best education of time and culture for her son. Her son followed the rhetoric and preaching of the world—different than that of Church and the One True God whom world harasses, incessantly, to change.
I don’t know if the mother prayed, but she gave in to the world. She gave in to her child who said they were something other than what God created them to be. She trusted the wisest minds of the time—doctors of medicine, science, and psychology (perhaps Manicheans of our day). She signed legal documents (written by further wise men) saying so.
The Manicheans did not save her son. They did not cure the despair and disillusion of soul and self when divorced and part from God whereby self and Truth are found.
I don’t know if she stopped praying, when she caved and followed guidance of the wisest minds; but the son—many years short of Monica’s thirty years of continuous prayer—attacked the Church and Faith Monica so loved.
One mother, from continuous faith and prayer for her son to turn away from ways the world and return again to the Faith and Church, created a saint.
Another, surrendering child to wisdom of world and Manicheans of modern-day—a devil.
Never stop praying for your Child. No one is beyond hope, reconcile and salvation—the possibility of becoming Saint, no matter history, pasts, and present way.
Without faith—without living in accordance of so—what possibility is there for Miracle? All things are possible for they who believe.[i]
How much of our destinies of our life affected, unknown to all but God, by the prayers and intercessions of those who love us?
The Manicheans are dead. The Church remains.
Never stop praying for your Child. No one is beyond hope, reconcile and salvation—the possibility of becoming Saint. All things are possible for they who believe.
[i] Mark 9: 22