This is the edited text of the homily given by Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP at the Mass for the National Conference of Catholic Health Australia Memorial of St Monica at St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, 27 August 2024.
A distraught mother wails inconsolably as the corpse of her son is carried out for burial (Lk 7:11-17). We don’t know the cause of death, age of the deceased, or the family circumstances, but Luke the Beloved Physician is meticulous, as a health professional should be, in his observations and charting. So, we know they are in Nain, a small village on the northwestern slope of Jebel ed-Duchy, 13 km from Nazareth. It commands an extensive view across the plain to Carmel, over the Nazareth Hills, and way past Tabor where the white peak of Hermon glistens in the sun. Luke records that Jesus addressed the deceased as Nεανίσκε (Neaniske), which meant a young man of working age. He is the only child of a widow, which suggests she may have been widowed early and raised him alone. Though she might only be in her late thirties, she now faces an uncertain future, likely lonely and destitute. As mother and townsfolk carry the corpse to the cemetery for burial, Jesus and disciples encounter grief, fear, anger, incredulity, despair.
Dr Luke reports that when Jesus saw this scene, He ἐσπλαγχνίσθη (esplanchnisthē) which our lectionary translates rather lamely as feeling sorry for or compassionate towards her. The word actually means His bowels churned with visceral empathy. The tears of the poor mother stir Him from the pit of His gut.
Almost four centuries later, the tears of another heartbroken mother would again lead to the revival of another ‘dead’ son. In his famous Confessions, St Augustine records Monica’s incessant badgering of a certain North African bishop to talk to her son Gus, refute his errors and teach him better ways. “Don’t worry yourself,” the bishop said, “boys will be boys, he’s not yet ready to turn from his evil ways, but he’s a thinker and a reader, and eventually he’ll discover how unsatisfying his ways are. Pray for him and be patient.” But like the story of the importunate widow in the same Gospel (Lk 18:1-8), she kept banging at his door until the exasperated bishop was driven to say: “Go away, for it is impossible for the son of so many tears to perish!”
Born in the 4th century in Roman North Africa, Monica had a hard life. Her pagan Roman husband Patricius was unfaithful, abusive and despised her Christian faith. She had little support raising their three children, but she was determined they would be Christians. Unfortunately, her most precocious child, Gus, dumped his faith in his adolescence, dabbling in the esoteric doctrines of Manichean dualists, all the while indulging his passions and fathering a son out of wedlock. Aware that her boy was effectively dead to the Lord, Monica was grief-stricken and for 17 years prayed incessantly that her boy might be led back from apostasy into life with the Lord.
Eventually her prayerful tears were answered. Augustine not “reverted” to the Christian faith, he lent his immense talents to service of the Church as bishop, theologian and one of the most prolific Christian writers of all time. He penned over 5 million words, including some of the greatest works ever produced, not only in the Christian tradition but in the entire Western literary canon. And we’d never have had his genius without the unrelenting prayers of his Mum.
Elsewhere in his Confessions, Augustine identifies a parallel between the story of the Widow of Nain and that of his own conversion, claiming that it was Monica’s tears at the thought of her son’s spiritual death that moved God to act. “She carried me forth on the bier of her thoughts, so that you might say to the widow’s son, ‘Young man, I say to you arise!’”
Both the stories of the Nainite Widow and of Monica highlight the immensity of God’s love for us and our part in His work as intercessors. First, God is the divine physician. Throughout His ministry Jesus demonstrated that He was God ready, willing and able to heal people of their physical afflictions and, in the case of Lazarus, Jairus’ daughter and the widow’s son, even to raise them from death.
But the divine physician is not only concerned with our physical health. We are spiritual beings as much as material. We are made in God’s image, animated by His breath, ordered towards ultimate union with Him. As such, we can suffer not only physical death but emotional-spiritual death also. Jesus cautions against thinking physical health is all that matters: “Don’t worry about those who can kill the body so much as about those who can kill both body and soul” (Mt 10:28). So Jesus’ bowels were moved with σπλαγχνίζομαι (splagchnizomai)-compassion, not just for those suffering disease, but those who were hungry, harassed or helpless, burdened by debt, shame or evil. Many of His healings were spiritual more than physical, or were both, as when He told the cripple lowered through the roof that his sins were forgiven before offering a physical healing. So Monica was right to take her son’s spiritual-psychological health every bit as seriously as his bodily wellbeing. Body and soul, both have their sicknesses, both their remedies.
The best of Catholic health holds these truths together. To care is to care for the other in the fullness of their humanity: body and soul. And this care is modelled on God’s love for the whole person: an active, practical, here-and-now love; a healing and elevating love. The various organisations, institutions and employees under the umbrella of Catholic Health Australia are called to be Christ’s healing hands today saying, “As Christ reached out to touch, console and heal, so do we!” In playing our part in incarnating that Good News in the lives of the sick, frail elderly and dying, we lead our beloved clients to know the God of body and soul, who will one day say to them as He did to the widow’s son and Monica’s also: “I say to you: arise!”