Homily for the Memorial of Saint Monica: Intercessory Prayer

        Today on the Feast of St Monica, we celebrate the efficacy of a mother’s prayers for her children. Even the proper Collect for today’s Mass makes reference to it.  In the Confessional, I often encounter parents who have been praying for their children for years with seemingly little good effect, and it weighs heavily upon their hearts.  But “results” are not how we measure the efficacy of intercessory prayer.  By praying for someone we love, we are obtaining graces for them that we might not ever see the fruits of, until we are in heaven.  You know this, Sisters, far better than I, you who live your hidden lives praying for, interceding on behalf of those who cannot or will not pray themselves.

          St Monica wasn’t praying for her son all those years for results.  She wasn’t asking God for a favor.  If she had been, she probably would have abandoned her request years before and given up on God in frustration.  No, Monica prayed for love, because of love – the love of God and the love of her son.  Because she loved her son, she wanted everything good for him; and she knew, with utter conviction, that the greatest good for each one of us is God Himself; and through the years, as her brilliant son went off chasing after all sorts of false goods or partial goods, his mother prayed and wept that her son’s mind and heart would be opened to see and to welcome his and her and our true Good, the love of God which comes to us in Christ Jesus our Lord.  And through the instrumentality of the preaching of St Ambrose and the famous “tolle, legge” incident, God finally broke through Augustine’s thickness of head and hardness of heart, one might say.

          Now, the thing about intercessory prayer on behalf of those whom we love is that we have no control over the person we are praying for and his or her openness to the graces we are obtaining for them, and the truth is we might not ever see the effects of the graces we have obtained on their behalf, but they are graces nonetheless.

I have often thought of this when I have been called in the past to the bedside of a dying person to administer the Last Sacraments.  I often think: who was it in this person’s life who prayed for them, who obtained the grace for this person to have a priest by their bedside as they came to the end of their earthly journey, when so many of us, sadly, die without that grace?  Who was it? Was it their grandmother? A Sister who taught them in parochial school many years ago?  Was it one of you? Soon enough, the dying person will know for sure, in the clarity of the light of heaven, but it may never be revealed, be known this side of paradise. Fr. Brian Mulcahy, O.P.