Yes, our Blessed Lord answered Monica’s prayers and tears, and touched Augustine’s heart and restored his soul to its spiritual life with God after it had been long dead in sins and unbelief.  And our Blessed Lord can still do the same today for lapsed sons and daughters of holy Mother Church in answer to the Church’s heartfelt prayer.  

Each generation produces its unhappy crop of lapsed communicants and worshippers.  The deadening influence of the outer world or of new and ill-chosen companions, does its fatal work, perhaps in the teens or early twenties, and the young people concerned are carried away to spiritual death and burial.  Their life with God, once so well-blessed and full of promise, has now prematurely ceased.  Baptism, Sunday School, Confirmation and Communion have led to nothing.  Religious impulses and the voice of conscience are stifled.  There is no longer any will to return to the former life with God; and even the ability to pray is lost.  Dead.  Now only Mother Church can pray for that help for which they can no longer pray themselves, and only our Blessed Lord can awaken their soul to life.