Novena to St. Monica

Monica was born around 331 in Thagaste in Roman North Africa, raised a Christian, and given in marriage to Patricius, a pagan official known for his temper and infidelity. She bore the marriage with patience and prudence, is recorded to have won over a difficult mother-in-law, and eventually saw her husband converted and baptized shortly before his death. Her greater trial was her son Augustine, whose years of ambition and wandering from the faith she met with years of prayer and tears, following him from North Africa to Rome and then to Milan. There she met St. Ambrose, under whose preaching Augustine was finally baptized at Easter in 387. Monica died that same year at Ostia, Italy, while she and Augustine were waiting for a ship home. Augustine's own account of her, in the Confessions, is the primary source for her life.

Biographical facts drawn from St. Augustine's Confessions (public domain in all standard translations pre-dating modern copyright, e.g. the Pusey translation) and public-domain hagiography (Catholic Encyclopedia, 1913).