As a wife and mother Monica suffered greatly. Her husband was hot tempered and irreligious, and her son wayward and contemptuous of her faith. She was a woman of courage and faith, who trusted in God. Her patience and her love won her husband to the Catholic faith, and after long years of waiting and persistent prayer he son too became a follower of Christ.

Everything we know about Monica comes from her son’s writings. Not long before she died, as Augustine records in his Confessions, she and Augustine experienced an ecstasy of soul in which “for one brief moment” their hearts “reached up to Wisdom, the maker of all things, and left with him the first fruits of their spirits.”

Monica was born in Thagaste, Algeria, in 331 or 332. She followed Augustine to Italy and saw him baptized in Milan. She looked after Augustine and the little circle of friend when they formed a community in Cassiciacum. On the way back to Africa, Monica died in Ostia near Rome in November, 387, at the age of fifty-five. Her remains are venerated in the church of St. Augustine in Rome.