Monica was a Berber Christian of Thagaste in Roman Africa. Married to the pagan Patricius — by all accounts a difficult husband — she bore him three children, the eldest of whom was Augustine. By patient long-suffering and prayer she converted her husband at the last and her violent mother-in-law.
Her son Augustine was a more painful struggle. She wept and prayed for him through his fifteen years as a Manichee, then as a skeptic, then as a sensualist with a mistress and a son out of wedlock. A bishop she begged to argue with Augustine sent her away with the words: 'Go in peace; the son of so many tears cannot be lost.' She followed Augustine to Rome and to Milan, and at Milan was on hand to weep with joy at his baptism by St. Ambrose at the Easter Vigil of 387.
Setting out for Africa together with her now-converted son a few months later, she fell ill at the port of Ostia. The conversation Monica and Augustine had together that day at the window overlooking the garden — recorded in Augustine's Confessions Book IX — is one of the great mystical passages of Christian literature, the two of them together touching for an instant the eternal Wisdom of God. She died there at fifty-five, asking only to be remembered at the altar.