Who was St. Augustine?
Augustine was born on November 13, 354, at Tagaste in Roman North Africa, now Souk Ahras in Algeria. His father, Patricius, was a pagan who was baptized late in life. His mother was Monica, whom the Church also honors as a saint, the day before her son. Around 370 he went to Carthage to study rhetoric. There he took a woman as his companion, and in 372 they had a son, Adeodatus. Reading Cicero's Hortensius set him searching for truth, and in 373 he joined the Manichees, a sect that taught that evil was a substance at war with good. He stayed with them for years, never more than a hearer, and they did not satisfy him.
He taught in Carthage and then in Rome from 382; the Catholic Encyclopedia dates his departure for Italy to 383. Vatican News gives 384 for the year he took the chair of rhetoric in Milan. In Milan he went to hear the bishop, Ambrose, and the sermons, Vatican News says, "touched him to the quick." By then he believed. What he could not do was change his life. In the Confessions he records the prayer of those years: "Grant me chastity and continency, but not yet." He describes what held him in words anyone who has fought a habit will recognize: "custom not resisted became necessity," and "whence I term it a chain," and of where it led: "did a hard bondage hold me enthralled."
The end came in a garden in Milan in 386. Vatican News dates it to August; the Catholic Encyclopedia says September. He was thirty-three. He heard a child's voice from a nearby house chanting "Take up and read." He opened the apostle Paul and read the first lines his eyes fell on, Romans 13:13-14: "put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof." His friend Alypius read the next verse and took it as his own. Ambrose baptized them at Easter 387, in the night of April 24 to 25. That autumn, as they waited at Ostia to sail home, Monica died.
Back in Africa, Augustine meant to live quietly. In 391 the people of Hippo pushed him forward to be ordained a priest, and a few years later he became their bishop. He held the see for thirty-four years, preached, argued and wrote, and he died on August 28, 430, while the Vandals besieged the city. He was in his seventy-sixth year. The Church names him a Doctor of the Church, and Franciscan Media lists him as patron of converts, printers and theologians.
Why Catholics pray to St. Augustine for faith, forgiveness and addiction
The first chapter of the Confessions is a prayer: "You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You." Most people who come to Augustine come because they are restless. Some have lost the faith they were raised in and cannot get it back by deciding to. Some have a sin they have confessed a hundred times. Some have a son or daughter who has walked away, and they are Monica, praying for years with nothing to show for it.
He is a saint for all of them because he was all of them. He did not become a Christian by willpower; he tells us plainly that his will was split, that he wanted to be free and wanted not to be, and that in the end God did what he could not. Catholics who struggle with drink, pornography, or a habit that has become a chain pray to him not as a man who was strong, but as a man who was weak and was rescued, and who wrote it all down so that no one after him would have to pretend.
Forgiveness is the other side of it. In Book 10 Augustine speaks to God about the years he wasted: "Too late did I love You, O Fairness, so ancient, and yet so new!" "For behold, You were within, and I without, and there did I seek You." "You called, and cried aloud, and forced open my deafness." "You touched me, and I burned for Your peace." These are the words of a man who has been forgiven a great deal and knows it. The familiar "Late have I loved you" is a modern rendering; the public-domain translation by J. G. Pilkington, quoted here, reads "Too late did I love You." The Latin is the same.
How to pray to St. Augustine
His memorial is August 28, the day he died, and it is kept in every parish of the Roman Rite. St. Monica's memorial is the day before, August 27, so the two go together; a novena from August 19 to 27 ends on her day and opens onto his. Any day works. He is prayed to late at night, which is when restless people are most restless.
Say the prayer below, and then read a page of the Confessions; Books 8 and 10 are the ones to start with, and they are free online in the Pilkington translation. If a specific sin is the problem, go to Confession and name it. Augustine's whole book is a confession, and he did not get free by keeping it private. Go to Mass. If a child has left the faith, pray with Monica as well as with him, and remember that she waited many years and that the answer, when it came, came through other people: a bishop, a friend, a child singing over a wall.
If what holds you is an addiction, prayer goes alongside treatment, a recovery program, a counselor or a doctor; it does not replace them. Augustine needed Ambrose, Alypius, his mother and a voice he did not expect. Nobody is converted alone, and nobody gets sober alone either.