John Henry Newman never used his marvellous powers of thought and language more effectively than during what he called his campaign in Ireland. His lectures on "University Education" in the Rotunda, his literary papers in the Catholic University Gazette, his sermons in the University Church that he built in St. Stephen's Green, display, according to the nature of their subjects, eloquence, grace and subtlety in a high degree. On a certain fourth of May in the middle of the fifties—it was indeed May 4, 1856—he began thus in his newly-erected pulpit:—
"This
day we celebrate one of the most remarkable feasts in the Calendar.
We commemorate a saint who gained the heavenly crown by prayers and
tears, by sleepless nights and weary wanderings, but not in the
administration of any high office m the Church, not in the fulfilment
of some great resolution or special counsel; not as a teacher,
evangelist, reformer, or champion of the faith ; not as a bishop of
the flock or temporal governor ; not by eloquence, by wisdom, or by
controversial success; not in the way of any other saint whom we
invoke in the circle of the year; but as a mother seeking and gaining
by her penances the conversion of her son. It was for no ordinary son
that she prayed, and it was no ordinary supplication by which she
gained Him. When a holy man saw its vehemence ere it was successful,
he said to her : 'Go in peace : the child of such prayers cannot
perish.' The prediction was fulfilled beyond its letter ; not only
was that young man converted, but after his conversion he became a
saint; not only a saint, but a doctor also, and instructed many unto
justice. St. Augustine was the son for whom she prayed; and, if he
has been a luminary for all ages of the Church since, many thanks do
we owe to his mother, St. Monica, who, having borne him in the flesh,
travailed for him in the spirit."
It is with
difficulty that I refrain from going further with this exquisite
discourse on "the Intellect the Instrument of Religious
Training." But I am not reminding you of St. Monica and her
instructive story for her own sake, but because I see in her a type
of one phase of the relations of our Blessed Lady with the great
Christian family, the Church of her Divine Son. The Blessed Virgin is
the St. Monica of all Christians, deserving from each of us far more
than the love and gratitude and confidence that St. Monica deserved
and gained from the generous heart and magnificent mind of St.
Augustine.
The two
mothers have this in common, that each derives her glory from her
Son. "Mary of whom was born Jesus.'' This fragment of an
inspired text is foundation deep enough and broad enough and strong
enough to sustain the vast superstructure of praise and reverence
built upon it by the piety of Christian hearts. Mary is the Mother of
Jesus, and Jesus is God. " Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for
us.''
St Monica
likewise in her due measure is known to us and loved and honoured by
us as the mother of St. Augustine, who in his turn attributed all
that was good in him to St. Monica. Cujus meriti credo esse omne quod
vivo. " To her (says this great saint and doctor of the Church),
to her belongs the merit of all the life, all the good that is in me,
all that I am."
There was
exquisite taste—if we may use so human a word in reference to a
thing so divine as the liturgy of the Mass—there was exquisite
taste shown in the selection of the Gospel of the Mass on the feast
of St. Monica, It sets before us a scene which is a very pathetic
revelation of the tenderness of the Heart of Jesus, St. Luke
describes it in his seventh chapter : how, " as Jesus drew near
the gate of the city, behold a dead man was carried forth, the only
son of his mother, and she was a widow." St. Augustine, too, may
be considered in this context the only son of his widowed mother, so
completely is Navigius lost and absorbed in his illustrious brother.
Herein the Blessed Virgin is like to the widow of Nairn and St.
Monica, but only as Mother of Jesus, not as by adoption mother of us
all. And, on the other hand, it is only under this latter aspect, as
the Mother of us all, that she bears a likeness to St. Monica during
the long years of patient, persevering prayers and tears, when, with
all the importunity of a mother's much enduring love, she was
besieging heaven for the conversion of her gifted son. Indeed she
imitated well the patience of our Blessed Mother in waiting for the
conversion of many a sinner. When all her efforts seemed to have
failed, when Augustine broke away from the mute reproach of her
presence and fled by stealth to Italy—even then Monica did not
despair. She made what must have been the hardest sacrifices for the
sake of one who was soon to prove himself worthy of it all; but that
only her motherly heart could hope for or foresee. She determined to
break up her home, to leave her native land, and to pursue the
fugitive, though she hardly knew whither he had gone.
What is the
parallel passage to this in the story of the Immaculate Mother ? We
might find it 'perhaps' in that unrecorded crisis in the life of our
Blessed Lady when the fear that had constantly haunted her is
realised at last, and Jesus leaves her for ever in order to be about
His Father's business, never again to be the same that He has been to
His Blessed Mother. With a yearning pang she sees Him depart, and
follows Him henceforth only in spirit, nor will she join Him again
till she is summoned to His cruel deathbed to suffer a mother's part
in His shame and pain.
It is better,
however, to link Mary and Monica together by their common likeness to
the unnamed widow of Naim. St. Augustine himself makes this
comparison for his mother at the beginning of the 6th Book of his "
Confessions " ; and, on the other hand, some holy writer has
imagined that one of the reasons why Jesus was so deeply affected by
the grief of this poor desolate woman following her only son to the
grave was because He saw in her an image of what His own Mother would
be when He, bowing His head in death, would leave her standing
desolate beside the Cross.
A milder
Calvary was St. Monica's at Ostia, where her mortal sickness fell
upon her on their way back to Africa. Milder and more easy, for she
did not see her son die, but saw him brought back to life, when God
restored him also to his mother. She left him a fervent believer in
Christ Jesus, a devoted child of His Church. She was now doubly his
mother, as she is called in the Matins of her feast. Monica, sancti
Augustini dupliciter mater, quia eum et mundo et coelo peperit. She
brought him forth into the life of this world, and she brought him
forth unto the life eternal. And so she might sing her Nunc Dimittis
and leave this world with the calmness of resignation, and even with
the eagerness of joy.
"Ah,
could thy grave at home in Carthage be !"
" Care
not for that, but lay me where I fall:
Everywhere
heard will be the judgment-call,
But at God's
altar oh! remember me."
Thus Monica,
and died in Italy.
She died in
exile, far away from her beloved home by the Libyan Sea. In exile.
But is not life itself an exile for all of us : exules filii Hevae?
Rather her exile ended there, and she was welcomed home in patria,
where, after many glorious labours, after many magnificent writings
which still instruct God's Church, St. Augustine joined her, and
mother and son will never more be parted. They are never separated in
the devotion of the faithful.
Art, as in
the famous picture by Ary Scheffer, always sets them before us
together. The Collect of the Mass of St. Monica, repeated seven times
through the office of her feast, belongs to the son almost as much as
to the mother.
" O God,
consoler of those who mourn and salvation of those who hope in Thee,
who didst mercifully receive the pious tears of Blessed Monica for
the conversion of her son, Augustine, grant to us through the
intercession of both to bewail our sins and to find mercy in Thy
grace, through Jesus Christ our Lord.''
Yes, through
the infinite merits of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and the
prayers of His Blessed Mother. We must not end with Monica and
Augustine, but with another Mother and another Son. For the subject
of our meditation is not St. Monica herself, but St. Monica as a type
of the Blessed Virgin.
When
considered as Mother of Him who is "First-born of many
brethren,'' Mary Immaculate is the St. Monica of all true Christians.
May she be such a mother to us, or rather may we be to her true
children, loving her ardently, praying to her constantly, and above
all serving faithfully her Divine Son, so that at our death He may be
able to work a greater miracle of mercy than that recorded in the
Gospel scene at the gate of Naim— restoring the son to the
mother—by passing on us a favourable judgement which will place us
for ever among the happy children of Mary in heaven.