The Power of a Mother’s Prayer

There’s a lovely passage in St. Francis de Sales’ spiritual classic Introduction to the Devout Life in which he lists several great Saints who were dedicated to the Lord by their mothers:

Before giving birth to S. Augustine, S. Monica offered him repeatedly to God’s Glory, as he himself tells us; and it is a good lesson for Christian women how to offer the fruit of their womb to God, Who accepts the free oblations of loving hearts, and promotes the desires of such faithful mothers: witness Samuel, S. Thomas Aquinas, S. Andrea di Fiesole, and others. S. Bernard’s mother, worthy of such a son, was wont to take her new-born babes in her arms to offer them to Jesus Christ, thenceforward loving them with a reverential love, as a sacred deposit from God; and so entirely was her offering accepted, that all her seven children became Saints. And when children begin to use their reason, fathers and mothers should take great pains to fill their hearts with the fear of God. This the good Queen Blanche did most earnestly by S. Louis, her son: witness her oft-repeated words, “My son, I would sooner see you die than guilty of a mortal sin;” words which sank so deeply into the saintly monarch’s heart, that he himself said there was no day on 278 which they did not recur to his mind, and strengthen him in treading God’s ways.

A footnote in the text notes that St. Francis was himself dedicated to the Lord while still unborn. Although I don’t warrant such grand company, I probably owe it to my mom to add a personal story here. When I was a newborn, I had a potentially-deadly birth defect that ultimately required surgery. My mother’s response (despite seeking a second opinion when the first doctor thought there was nothing medically wrong with me) was to pray Hannah’s prayer from 1 Samuel 1:11: “O Lord of hosts, if thou wilt indeed look on the affliction of thy maidservant, and remember me, and not forget thy maidservant, but wilt give to thy maidservant a son, then I will give him to the Lord all the days of his life, and no razor shall touch his head.” I’m assuming she omitted that last line, because she personally gave me many — now-embarrassing — haircuts (my choices were “bowl” or “buzz”).

My mom never told me about having prayed for me in this way until I told her I was entering seminary. While I didn’t end up becoming a priest, those five years were an incredibly privileged time for me, forming me in ways that will stay with me for life. I doubt that a day that goes by when my life isn’t enhanced in a dozen tiny ways by my experience of seminary formation. One of the innumerable sad details from the current sex abuse scandals is that parents are worried about encouraging their sons to consider seminary and the priesthood, and I think that’s a tragedy that will hurt the Church for a generation or more.

The point of this is that the best thing you can hope for your children is that they become Saints. This is your job as parents. Too often parents spend an inordinate amount of time, effort, and worry making sure that their kids get on the right teams or into the right schools, and too little time, effort, and worry making sure their kids are actually holy. Francis puts it like this:

We call races and generations Houses; and the Hebrews were wont to speak of the birth of children as “the building up of the house;” as it is written of the Jewish midwives in Egypt, that the Lord “made them houses;” whereby we learn that a good house is not reared so much by the accumulation of worldly goods, as by the bringing up of children in the ways of holiness and of God; and to this end no labour or trouble must be spared, for children are the crown of their parents. Thus it was that S. Monica stedfastly withstood S. Augustine’s evil propensities, and, following him across sea and land, he became more truly the child of her tears in the conversion of his soul, than the son of her body in his natural birth.