Two boys digging for a football post found Saint Monica's lost epitaph
In the summer of 1945, two boys dug a hole beside the church of Santa Aurea in Ostia to plant a football goalpost. They struck a fragment of the original gravestone of Monica, mother of Saint Augustine, whose epitaph had previously been known only from old manuscripts.
Monica was born around 332, probably in Thagaste, now Souk Ahras in Algeria, and her name suggests she was Berber. Married young to Patricius, a pagan town councillor with a violent temper and loose habits, she irritated him with her charity and prayer, though he is said always to have respected her. Of their children who survived infancy, the most famous was Augustine. When he fell gravely ill as a boy, Patricius agreed to his baptism, then withdrew consent once he recovered.
Augustine grew into a restless young man and, while studying rhetoric in Carthage, joined the Manichaeans. Monica at first banished him from her table, then reconciled after a vision. A bishop consoled her that the child of so many tears could not be lost, a line behind the legend of her weeping each night. When Augustine slipped away to Rome, she followed, then pursued him to Milan, where through Bishop Ambrose she finally saw him convert after 17 years of resistance. Ambrose also stopped her habit of bringing wine to shrines of the martyrs, fearing it tempted drinkers.
After six calm months together at Cassiciacum, Augustine was baptised by Ambrose in Milan. Mother and son set off for Africa, but Monica died at Ostia in 387, and Augustine's grief fed into his Confessions, the main source for her life. She was buried there and largely forgotten until her cult spread in the 13th century; in 1430 Pope Martin V had her relics brought to Rome, where they now rest in the Basilica of Sant'Agostino.
Her name travelled far. Santa Monica in California is often said to honour a spring named for her tears by the Spanish priest Juan Crespí, but his diary shows he actually called the place San Gregorio; the name Santa Monica was in use by the 1820s. Churches mark her feast on different days, and in 1934 Dutch nuns founded an order in her name to shelter women in crisis.
Source: Saint Monica
