Labor Day

 

When I was growing up back in the Bronx in America’s post-war Golden Age, I loved Labor Day, because it meant back to school. I was a nerdy kid, who loved to read, and loved to learn new things. Of course, that was not a fashionable view, so even then I learned the social imperative to conceal one's real feelings. Years later, as a grad student, I dreaded Labor Day because the University library would close the whole weekend for its annual sprucing up before the start of school. In those days, when so few places were air-conditioned, that meant not only no place to read, study, and socialize, but also no place to keep cool and to breathe pollen-free air. 

Labor Day has been a federal holiday since 1894, but it long ago joined most of our other national holidays in losing much of its original civic significance to become just a "holiday weekend" – an opportunity for shopping and other diversions. Even when the American labor movement was still strong and the traditional Labor Day Parade still defined New York’s Union Square, Labor Day was already becoming as much about the end of summer vacation, the last day for women to wear their white shoes and men their straw hats - and less of a serious civic celebration of American workers (and the affluence their astounding productivity had helped to produce).

That great post-World War II quarter century or so of unprecedented, nation-wide, across-the-board prosperity and a strong labor movement seems such a distant memory now in the present era of increasing economic inequality. Millions of Americans now suffer from unemployment, or underemployment, or are working but living in poverty as their basic needs too often go unmet, a situation that we should recognize represents a serious economic and moral failure for our nation. Certainly, one dimension of this failure is our diminished appreciation of the importance of productive work for a fulfilling human life and a flourishing economy. Work is more than just paying the bills. It’s how we realize our potential as productive people and active citizens, and contribute to the common good.

 

The Evangelist Matthew tells us that when Jesus came home to Nazareth, the hometown crowd dismissed him as “the carpenter’s son” [Matthew 13:55]. The context suggests it was familiarity with him a someone ordinary that most upset the people. In thus dismissing the ordinary workman in their midst, however, the Nazarenes missed out on the opportunity of a lifetime.

Today, we are surrounded by workers, whose omnipresence and familiarity make them almost invisible, out of sight, out of mind – the health-care workers who care for our increasingly elderly population, the nannies who watch over the next generation, the drivers and cyclists who do all the deliveries that make our extravagant consumer lifestyle so easy. That so many members of today’s working class are immigrants - that we need to find them from somewhere else -  only highlights how essential they are, while making them that much more vulnerable.

And now, even the educated classes – previously so privileged – feel more and more like proletarians. Soon they may be unemployed, overeducated proletarians, if runaway AI technology continues to have its way. Progress – that most unchristian of concepts – is rapidly rendering obsolete so much of what used to be taken for granted. All of which only makes it that much more urgent to recover an authentic understanding of human nature and human solidarity – and of fulfilling human labor as an essential component of a good life and a good society.

Homily for Labor Day, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, September 7, 2026.

(Photo: The first Labor Day Parade, New York, September 5, 1882, 

https://barbarasbookstores.com/the-first-labor-day-parade/)

"Come with Your Brothers into the Choir"

 

I don’t typically read “The Ethicist” column in the Sunday NY Times magazine. Sometimes, however, the moral dilemmas are common enough and relatable enough that I find the column somwhat more interesting. For example, one column a couple of weeks ago addressed the increasingly common problem of families fighting and refusing to remain in contact because of differences over politics and related cultural concerns. Of course, people have always disagreed about politics; but, until not that long ago, that would not usually have been seen as a reason to break off contact with someone.

In this particular case, the supposed ethical expert made what I thought were two particularly important points. The first is that family estrangement of this sort “has become sadly familiar over the past decade or so. The strategy of severing all ties with one’s parents has been encouraged by certain high-profile therapists,” supported by social media. Also “therapeutic culture has tended to expand, sometimes recklessly,” conflating complaints that “can arise from genuinely damaging relationships,” with descriptions of “ordinary parental shortcoming.” The second is that if you don’t want to be the reconciler/mediator, that is your choice, but that it may be worth the effort, “your participation might assist people you love in reaching some kind of resolution with one another.” It might, he says, somewhat pessimistically, because what he calls “No-contact culture” is resistant “to almost every effort at reconciliation.”

All this seemed especially on point as I was reflecting on today’s Gospel reading [Matthew 18:15-20], in which Jesus addresses the problem of conflict within the Church community and how to deal with it. Jesus doesn’t pretend, as religious people sometimes try to do, that there will never be conflicts. Conflict characterized the very first human family - Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel – and political and legal procedures to resolve conflicts, which might otherwise descend into endless cycles of violence, revenge, and vendettas, have been a cornerstone of civilized life.

 

It is, however, a very specific sort of “due process” that Jesus proposes – religious rather than secular, but also communitarian rather than individualistic and oriented toward reconciliation rather than legal justice, material compensation, or personal punishment.

Obsessed as we all are in our individualistic society with personal rights, when we speak of “due process” typically what get emphasized are legal guarantees for the individuals involved. The “due process,” which Jesus outlines, focuses less on the individuals and their rights or sensitivities and more on the community. And, most importantly, it is a process aimed not at vindication and separation but at reconciliation and reincorporation into the community.

In that regard, it reminds me of the process in Church law for dealing with problematic people in religious communities. The person is warned and given a chance to change course several times before the process ends in expulsion. That’s because the goal of the process is not expulsion but rather the person’s reconciliation with the community. Expulsion may end up being necessary, but always only as a last resort - as it is in the process Jesus outlines in today’s Gospel, in which only after three tries – individually, in a small group, and finally involving the whole community – is the person expelled.

Even so, the story doesn’t quite end there. The excommunication which Jesus outlines is specified as: If he refuses to listen even to the church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector.

Now, in the ordinary world, the meaning of that would have been perfectly clear. As much as possible, devout, observant Jews avoided undue contact with such people, and they probably would generally avoid admitting them into their homes and sharing meals with them. That served a certain purpose in that society, just as judicial proceedings and imprisonment do in our society.

Yet, when Jesus says treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector, he may be muddying the waters a bit, because, of course, we can all recall how Jesus himself sometimes treated Gentiles and tax collectors. Such people may indeed be outside the community, and that may be because of their own bad behavior, but they’re not forgotten. In the divided, highly conflicted North African Church of the fourth century, Saint Augustine (354-430), speaking of the heretical and schismatic Donatist Christians he had to oppose so vigorously, famously said: “My friends, we must grieve over these as over our brothers. Whether they like it or not, they are our brothers” [Commentary on Psalm 32 (33)].

 

For years, I was a fan of medieval mystery stories, like Ellis Peters’ 20 Brother Cadfael Mysteries (set in 12th-century Shrewsbury).  In these mysteries, Brother Cadfael - over and above his avocation as an amateur but very effective detective - is, first and foremost, a Benedictine monk. But, In the 20th and final Brother Cadfael book, called Brother Cadfael’s Penance, Cadfael has, sadly, broken his vow of obedience. But then, at the end of the story, he returns to the monastery and kneels before his Abbot, and the Abbot simply responds: “Get up now, and come with your brothers into the choir.”

 

Unlike Cadfael and his brother monks, we live in a conflict-obsessed society driven by social media and what some, on both sides of the political divide, have taken to calling “cancel culture.” Clearly, we cannot be unaffected by all the vitriolic conflict that surrounds us. Yet, whatever we are or do as a community of disciples, our goal can never simply be to cancel one another. Rather, it must always be to bring us all back together, so that we may eventually all be together, here and now at this altar, and forever in God’s kingdom.

Homily for the 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, September 6, 2026.

The Great

Today, the Church commemorates Pope Saint Gregory the Great, who was Pope from September 3, 590, until his death on March 12, 604. He is one of only two Popes officially entitled "the Great" - the other being Pope Saint Leo the Great, who was Pope from 440 to 461. He is also one of the four great Latin Doctors of the Church - along with Saint Ambrose (c.340-397), Saint Jerome (c.343-420), and Saint Augustine (354-430).

Gregory was born into a wealthy noble Roman family. His father was a patrician, a senator, and prefect of the city, which last post Gregory himself also held as a young man. After his father's death, he converted his family home into a monastery and became a monk there himself. His monastic life was interrupted when for several years he served as the Pope's Ambassador to the Emperor in Constantinople and then was permanently interrupted when he was elected Pope himself. He was the first pope to adopt the title "Servant of the Servants of God." To improve social services in the city, he organized the resources of the Church introducing an early form of basic accounting. In his liturgical reforms, he famously moved the Our Father to its present position right after the Eucharistic Prayer. The Church's official form of chant also bears his name. He wrote extensively. Many of his sermons and over 850 of his letters survive.

Gregory had a strong a strong missionary commitment and is credited with re-energizing the Church's missionary work among the non-Christian peoples of northern Europe. He is most famous for sending Saint Augustine, who had succeeded him in charge of his Roman monastery, to evangelize the Anglo-Saxons, who had conquered much of what is now England. Roman Britain had, of course, had a Christian community, based in London, but that older Roman British Celtic Christianity was by then largely confined to the west (Wales).   It was from there that Saint Patrick had earlier emerged to evangelize Ireland. But it was Gregory who undertook the evangelization of Anglo-Saxon England, sending Saint Augustine who established his See at Canterbury. 

Gregory wrote to Augustine:   "Almighty God places good men in authority that he may impart through them the gifts of his mercy to their subjects. And this we find to be the case with the British over whom you have been appointed, that through the blessings bestowed on you the blessings of heaven might be bestowed on your people also." Gregory's outreach to England was so successful that English missionaries also in turn evangelized much of what is now Germany. Ultimately, the Church in the English-speaking world is his great legacy, as the English-speaking world has been the beneficiary of Gregory the Great's outward-looking missionary zeal.

Homily for the Commemoration of Pope Saint Gregory the Great, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, September 3, 2026.

Photo: Altar of Saint Gregory the Great in Saint Peter's Basilica, Rome, where Saint Gregory is buried.

Reading the Aeneid

 

I sing of arms and of a man displaced                                                                                          by Fate, the first to leave the coast of Troy                                                                                    for Italy and its Lavinian shores:                                                                                                  the power of the gods and vicious wrath                                                                                      of unforgetting Juno hurled him far                                                                                            across the sea and lands, and he endured                                                                                    still further pain in war - the price to found                                                                                    his city and install his gods in Latium.                                                                                      The Latin race, the Alban lords, the walls                                                                                   of soaring Rome: from here they all began.

Virgil, Aeneid (Book 1, 1-10).

Homer's Odyssey is everywhere right now, thanks to Christopher Nolan's entertaining - if also problematic - portrayal of it on screen this summer. I first read the Odyssey in high school; the Iliad later. Until this week, however, I had never actually read Virgil's venerable Latin classic, the Aeneid, his late first-century B.C. account of the Trojan prince Aeneas' escape from the calamity of the Trojan War's end and his Odyssey-like journey across the Mediterranean, harassed by the vengeful goddess Juno, until he eventually settled in Italy and became the putative ancestor of the Romans. Being about Rome and having been written in Latin, Virgil's Aeneid may have been the most influential literary work of all the Greek and Roman classics.I knew about the Aeneid, of course, but it remained among the many classics which one ought to know something about without ever actually getting around to reading it. 

Once upon a time, however, the world was very different, and the Virgil-Homer hierarchy was reversed. As Bryn Mawr classicist Catherine Conybeare has noted, Latin-speaking Roman schoolboys "learned to read by sounding out syllables from the Aeneid. The Aeneid taught them to scan lines of poetry, and moreover to interpret them. Children learned swaths of the poem by heart. Later on boys would begin the rhetorical studies on which an imperial career was based by entering imaginatively into the characters from the Aeneid and composing appropriate speeches for them to declaim at crucial moments of choice or crisis. Wherever in the empire their careers took these young men, an apposite quotation form the Aeneid thrown casually into their conversation or their correspondence would immediately establish them as a member of the educated ruling classes" [Augustine the African, Norton, Liveright, 2025, p. 5].

Having been energized by all the renewed classical hype engendered by Christopher Nolan's on-screen Odyssey this summer, I have - with somewhat surprising enthusiasm - returned to the sources, the Iliad itself and the Odyssey itself (albeit in English translations), and I now find myself emboldened to tackle Virgil's Roman-centric sequel - in the 2025 translation by Scott McGil and Susannah Wright (Norton Liveright), which includes a superb Introduction by the famous Homeric translator Emily Wilson. (All references here are to that translation.)

The Aeneid - 9,896 Latin lines written (like the Iliad and the Odyssey) in dactylic hexameter - was composed by Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) in the last decade of his life (29-29 B.C.) It is thought that the poem may have actually been left unfinished - as evidenced by the presence of several metrically incomplete verses. Virgil's hero, Aeneas, was already familiar from the Iliad as a Trojan prince and a son of Aphrodite (Venus). The first six of Aeneid's twelve books recount the story of Aeneas' Odyssey-like wandering from Troy to Italy, including in Book 2 Virgil's violent account of the actual fall of Troy, a grief no words can tell (2.4), returning the reader to the blood-soaked, heroic world of the Iliad. The remaining six books recount the Trojans' ultimately victorious Iliad-like wars with the Latins, with whose name and language Aeneas and his Trojan followers have been destined to assimilate. The poem served as a founding myth for the city (and later empire) of Rome, connecting Rome back to the heroic age of Troy and promoting the legitimate rule of the Julian dynasty as the descendants of the goddess Venus and the Trojan hero Aeneas. Already, almost at the poem's beginning, notwithstanding Juno's hostility, Jupiter had promised Venus, Aeneas' mother, regarding his descendants: I set no bounds of space or time for them; I have bestowed dominion without end (1. 332-333).

Juno's hostility, however, is a constant reminder that with Virgil (as with Homer, who had Odysseus forever afflicted by Poseidon's wrath), we are in a very different moral universe from our own. We are in a world of capricious gods and goddesses, who exercise control over human affairs in unpredictable ways and who can sometimes be appeased but sometimes not. As Virgil himself expressed it, what offense, what painful insult led the queen of heaven to drive a man renowned for faithfulness through such ordeals, such endless miseries? Do gods have so much anger in their hearts? (1. 11-15).

Nor are the gods alone when it comes to complex and intense emotions!

"Hector fights for his country. Achilles fights only for himself." So said Agamemnon in the 2004 film Troy. As Hector's tear-inducing farewell conversation with his wife in Book 6 of the actual Iliad illustrates, Hector was not immune from Bronze Age heroic vainglory akin to that of Achilles, but neither was the movie version of Agamemnon all that wrong in the important personal differences which Agamemnon noted between the two heroes. Ascribed ancestry aside, this was undoubtedly another reason why the civic-minded Romans would have wanted to identify themselves with the Trojan cause and would have taken pride in their supposed Trojan ancestor, Aeneas. And, unlike Achilles or Odysseus, Aeneas' most outstanding trait is not some manifestation of physical or mental superiority but his piety. This too would appeal strongly to the Romans, because piety highlights the hero's relationship with and devotion to both the gods and the hero's human communities (e.g., family and city). Unlike the Greeks', the unique artistry of the Romans was political - as foretold by the ghost of Aeneas' father, Anchises, in Book 6: Remember, Roman, to rule the world (for these will be your arts) and to impose on it an ordered peace (6. 1023-1026). Of course, it would be precisely this passage - reimagined as arrogance - which Saint Augustine would later directly attack in his de-mystification of Roman imperialism in his monumental anti-Aeneid, The City of God!

There is, of course, quite a cost in human terms to dominion without end, to which the women characters - whether Andromache in the Iliad or Dido in the Aeneid - are especially poignant witnesses. Interestingly, the Iliad, dominated by Achilles' seemingly unquenchable rage and filled with destructive battle-after-battle, ends on a humane note as an angry Achilles shows mercy to Priam, Hector's grieving father. In the Aeneid, however, Aeneas in his fury considers but then rejects Turnus' plea for mercy, and the poem ends in violent death - a fitting foreshadowing, perhaps, of the enormous human cost to be exacted in producing the Augustan pax romana, the high price to be paid for empire. He burned with anger as he plunged his blade into his rival's breast. The chill of death made Turnus' limbs go slack, and with a groan, his spirit fled in protest to the shades (12. 1142-1145).

Mother and Son - Saints for the Ages

 

Tomorrow, on the anniversary of his death, the Church will commemorate one of its greatest saints and Doctors of the Church, Saint Augustine (354-430). Today, as if in anticipation, the contemporary calendar commemorates Augustine's mother, Saint Monica (331-387), thus connecting their veneration as saints, as they were so closely united in life. (The exact date of Monica's death in 387 is unknown. For many centuries, prior to the adoption of the contemporary calendar, Monica was commemorated on May 4.)

One of the highlights of Augustinian Pope Leo XIV's recent visit to Algeria was his pilgrimage to Annaba, where he celebrated Mass in the 19th-century French colonial Basilica of Saint Augustine, which overlooks the archeological site of Hippo Regius, the coastal city where Augustine served as Bishop, lived in community, preached, and wrote, from 396 until his death during the Vandal invasion of Roman North Africa. (The Roman province of Africa corresponded to the territory south of the Mediterranean, north of the Sahara, and west of Egypt, i.e, much of modern Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco). 

Monica never made it with Augustine to Hippo. After a famous conversation, which Augustine describes in Book 9 of his Confessions, Monica died at Ostia in Italy. Augustine, his son Adeotatus, and others (among them Augustine's lifelong friend Alypius) were all there en route back home to Africa after their baptism by Saint Ambrose in Milan at Easter, April 24-25, 387. The connection with Monica highlights Augustine's spiritual journey prior to his later ministry as bishop, and it reminds us that Augustine's "conversion" was really his return - and full adult commitment - to the religion of his childhood, the religion of his mother.

The transition from Augustine as spiritual wanderer to Augustine as committed man of the Church also marked the culmination of Monica's presence in his life, her role having been completed as she herself acknowledged. Thus, in that last conversation, Monica said to her son, "I did have one reason for wanting to live a little longer: to see you become a Catholic Christian before I died. God has lavished his gifts on me in that respect, for I know that you have even renounced earthly happiness to become his servant" (Confessions, 9:10). Saint Monica is thus rightly remembered in the Church as a model of virtuous motherhood and persevering prayer. 

Augustine had been the product of a religiously and culturally "mixed marriage." That "mixed marriage" represented the two different directions then still actually available to Augustine  - the old Roman civic tradition that represented the best of the past and was coming to an end, and the new tradition of Christian faith that represented hope in the future. In Augustine's personal experience, his pagan father, Patricius, personified the former, and Monica the latter. Monica, moreover, didn't just represent residual impressions from Augustine's childhood religious experience. She served as a bridge connecting those impressions (and that childhood experience) with his active adult re-immersion in the public life of his time in the context of his increasing involvement in the communal life of the Church. 

As Paul Tillich pointed out, in A History of Christian Thought, Monica's influence on Augustine meant the influence of Christian tradition. Tillich compared Augustine with Plato, who had written out of the tradition of the Athenian gentry to which he belonged, but which was coming to an end, whereas with Augustine the tradition was new. Thus, Karl Adam, in Saint Augustine: the Odyssey of his Soul, described Augustine's youthful religious conflicts as a fight against the Church already in his heart.

The relationship between Monica and Augustine illustrates the importance in life of what a social scientist might call primary socialization. Having sampled everything late Roman antiquity had to offer in terms of intellectual and spiritual options, Augustine in the end returned to the faith of his childhood, to which he had long before been introduced by his mother. 

Infatuated as we moderns erroneously are with individual autonomy, we are more likely to emphasize how we grow and change physically, intellectually, and spiritually, and how we keep growing and changing throughout our lives. Yet what we learn and experience as children - in the family and in our early social surroundings - may be what sticks with us most in both acknowledged and unacknowledged ways. How we are formed in the home may have more to do with who we are and what we become and how we turn out than almost anything else that happens later. Augustine's effusive tribute to his mother, Monica, highlights how important such socialization is and how essential it is for society (and the Church community) to nurture that.

Max Weber, in The Sociology of Religion, once observed that no religion ever resulted from intellectuals' chatter. Saint Monica's role in Augustine's transformation substituted for what was religiously defective amid the admitted attractions of philosophy. She represented the alternative Augustine found in the authentic piety of the faith community. (Hence the symbolic appropriateness  of Monica's role in Augustine's early dialogue De beata vita, IV, 35, where she invoked Saint Ambrose, who, perhaps more than anyone else in Augustine's experience, personally modeled Christian faith's transformative effect on classical romanitas.) The absence of such traditional familial and communal bonds for so many in our society makes one wonder how something resembling Augustine's "conversion" can occur in a world unmoored from the hold of tradition and popular piety, and what, if anything, can take their place.

Meanwhile, Monica's famous son still stands out as one of the most towering figures from the Church's history and one of those ancient figures who still speaks directly to today. Augustine's spiritual journey was also an intellectual and cultural one, in that he grappled with the leading ideas of his time both in philosophy and in heretical forms of Christianity. How equipped are we today to do that? Or are we tempted instead to hide from this challenge?

As Bishop of Hippo, Augustine ended up as a leading figure in the somewhat self-enclosed province of Roman North Africa. Augustine's youthful spiritual journey had led him to attempt a heroic break from the world, but then the Church pulled him back even deeper into engagement with the Roman and African world. As H.W. Coates, who credits the great Augustine biographer Peter Brown for having "pulled Augustine out of modern Protestant abstractions and put him back in the complicated Roman world he actually inhabited," has emphasized, "Augustine does not stand outside the ancient world looking backward at it. He belongs to it."

Within that ancient Roman and African world, Augustine experienced the historical process in which the Catholic Church became the established Church of Latin Western civilization, powerful in practice as well as in theory. Meanwhile, thanks to the pressure of unexpected historical events, Augustine articulated a Christian philosophy of history, which challenged and broke with what was then the conventional wisdom, what we might call "Roman imperial exceptionalism," thereby definitively demystifying politics for Christian theology and spirituality. How have we fully appreciated and appropriated that important lesson in the face of the moral threat today of a certain sort of renewed Catholic "integralism" and the perennial problem of American religious "exceptionalism"? These characteristics of the transitional time in which Saint Augustine lived and in which he became one of the Church's dominant voices have a lot in common with our contemporary era in ways most other historical periods do not and hence provide ample opportunities for renewed reflection.

Augustine is rightly remembered as the Doctor gratiae ("Doctor of Grace"), because of his emphasis on our fundamental need for God's gratuitous grace - in opposition to the heresy of Pelagius. He could also be called a Doctor of Unity because of his tireless advocacy of the unity of the Church against the schismatic Donatist church. This aspect of Augustine's pastoral ministry particularly resonates with the challenges facing today's politically polarized and fractured Church and world, in which the Gospel is increasingly overshadowed and disfigured by partisan identifications.

Saint Augustine also wrote a Rule, which has historically been adopted and adapted as a basis for the common life of many Catholic religious communities. After his return to Africa, Augustine created his first quasi-religious community in his hometown of Tagaste (Souk Ahras, Algeria) in 388, only a year after his baptism. He did the same in Hippo in 391 after his relocation there as a presbyter. Then a few years later, after being ordained bishop, he set up a similar community for fellow clergy in his house. There, around 397, he wrote the Rule that bears his name. This relatively short, biblically based text, reflecting some of the earliest experiences of cenobitic religious life in the Latin Church, was inspired by Luke's image of the Jerusalem community in Acts.

According to a famous 8th-9th-century legend (attested to by Hincmar of Reims), after Augustine's baptism Ambrose and his new neophyte spontaneously composed and sang alternate verses of what became the Church's great hymn of Thanksgiving, the Te Deum. While there may be no historical basis for this legend, if one were ever to pick an event which called for a Te Deum to be sung in thanksgiving, surely Saint Augustine's return to his childhood religion at that pivotal point in the history of the Latin Church would be on the short list of finalists! And, thanks to his own account in his justly famous Confessions, Monica and Augustine's story is one of the best known and most influential in the history of the Church and in Western literature.

So much of our appreciation of Monica and Augustine - a mother and her son, both Roman African Christians and saints for the ages - is flavored by Augustine's monumental work of self-exploration, his Confessions, which broke new ground in the ancient art of biography and still speaks to us about how a person's past experiences remain an active aspect of one's present personality. In his own late-life Retractationes, Augustine spoke of his "Thirteen books of my Confessions, which praise the just and good God in all my evil and good ways, and stir up towards him men's mind and feelings," which, "had this effect on me when I wrote them, and they still do this, when I now read them." 

May they continue to have such effects in us today!

Image: "St. Augustine's Vision and the Death of Monica," painted by well-known Renaissance artist Benozzo Gozzoli (1420-1497),  based on his reading of Augustine's Confessions. This is one of several such frescoes in the Church of Saint Augustine, in San Gimignano, Italy. After his baptism at Easter 387, Augustine and Monica went to Rome's port city of Ostia to prepare for their journey back to Africa. There Monica became ill. In the center of the fresco, is Monica on her deathbed, with Augustine standing by her side. Augustione's friend Alypius is also there.  The fresco alos portrayse Monica and Augustine looking out over the garden, an event recounted in the Confessions, just before Monica's illness. There is also a ship, taking Augustine and Alypius back to Africa. A woman with some children in the foreground represent the local Christians in Ostia, who comforted Augustine.