Saint Monica

Saint Monica (331-387) is one of the most influential mothers in Christian history. Born in North Africa to a Christian family, she was given in marriage to Patricius — a pagan with a difficult temper, prone to outbursts and infidelity. Monica's response across decades of marriage was prayer, patience, and quiet witness. Her contemporaries described her as a peacemaker in a household and community where peace was hard to find. Patricius eventually converted to Christianity shortly before his death, in large part because of her example.

Her greatest agony was her son Augustine. Brilliant, restless, drawn to fashionable philosophies and irregular relationships, he wandered far from the faith of his mother for nearly two decades. Monica prayed for him without ceasing. She wept over him; she followed him from Africa to Italy; she pursued him with the persistence that only a mother can sustain. When she sought a bishop's counsel about her son, he is reputed to have said, "It is not possible that the son of so many tears should be lost." She lived to see Augustine baptized in Milan in 387, just months before her own death.

For Catholic women, Monica is the great patroness of difficult marriages, of mothers anxious for their children, and especially of those whose loved ones have wandered from the faith. Her intercession is sought by mothers of teens or adult children who have stopped practicing, by spouses of non-believers or non-practicing Catholics, and by all those whose love includes a long, painful season of waiting and praying for someone they cannot make believe.

Augustine's Confessions includes one of the most beautiful descriptions of a mother in all of literature — his account of Monica's death at Ostia, after a final shared mystical conversation about the eternal life she was about to enter and he was now to live for. They are buried far apart but venerated together; her witness made his conversion possible, and his writings made her witness famous.