The Church reminds us what St. Augustine owed to his mother by attributing to the prayers of St. Monica the conversion of her son and by choosing for the Gospel on her feast the account of the raising from the dead of the son of the widow of Naim. St. Monica was born at Tagaste in 322; she died at Ostia in 387. St. Monica, by her earnestness to gain her son to God, is the model of good mothers. Upon her death, St. Augustine said, “If any one think it a sin that I thus wept for my mother some small part of an hour; and a mother who many years had wept for me, that I might live to thy eyes, O Lord: let him not deride me for it; but rather, if his charity be great, let him weep also for my sins before thee.”