The Power Behind A Mother’s Prayers!

Wednesday, August 27, 2025

Feast of St. Monica

1 Thess 2:9-13; Mt 23: 27-32

Today we celebrate the feast of St. Monica, the unparalleled example of a mother whose role is highly essential in planting the Christian faith in her children.

Hence, it is with great significance and relevance that St. Monica’s feast is celebrated a day ahead of St. Augustine’s.

If not for Monica’s ceaseless intercessory prayers for thirty-three years, St. Augustine’s conversion would have been doubtful. 

What equally moved Augustine’s heart, besides God’s grace, was his mother’s incessant prayers. 

Thus, St. Monica offers the example that a Christian mother bears the child not just in the womb but for the rest of her life. 

Though she became the symbol of motherly sacrifice, St. Monica still felt her inadequacy as a mother. 

St. Monica once said to Bishop Ambrose about her son Augustine, ‘I should have been a better mother.’ And the bishop responded, ‘If Augustine had been an easier child, God would not have given him a mother like you.’

Indeed, Augustine needed a mother like Monica. This is why he recounted regarding his mother: ‘While yet a child I had heard from her of the eternal life promised to us through the humiliations of the Lord, our God, Who came down to cure our pride. My father could never so far overcome in me the influence of my mother as to prevent me from believing in Christ for she laboured that You, my God, should be my Father rather than he, and in this You did assist her.’

Reflecting on St. Monica’s life from the backdrop of today’s Gospel, we find that Monica never pretended, like the scribes and Pharisees, that everything was alright in her life. Instead, she prayed, wept, fasted, and never gave up. There was nothing whitewashed about her faith. This is why she could take on her messy life with the strength she found in prayer. The mother who strongly believed that God’s power would transform the heart of her wayward son eventually succeeded by moving the heart of God in her son’s favor. Indeed, Augustine became not just a Christian but one of the greatest saints and theologians of all time. 

It is not an exaggeration to claim that only Monica’s faith and fidelity achieved the miraculous conversion of a son like Augustine. 

St. Monica exemplifies the power behind a mother’s prayers.

Let us pray that we may inherit faithfulness and perseverance from St. Monica to move the heart of God through our spiritual intimacy. 

Fr. Dhinakaran Savariyar