Monica was born around the year 330 into a Christian family in Roman North Africa. She was given in marriage to Patrick, a pagan small farmer and minor town official in Thagaste, now Souk-Akras in eastern Algeria. In 354 their son Augustine was born and there were at least two other children, a son called Navigius and an unnamed daughter who later was to enter a convent founded by Augustine. Our knowledge of Monica is derived from the account given by Augustine in his «Confessions». Monica was a devout Christian matron, attentive to the demands of her faith and the needs of her neighbours. She had been brought up religiously, in the fear of God as Augustine puts it, more by a rather severe elderly servant than by her parents.
Once married to Patrick, a non-Christian who could be difficult and irascible at times as well as unfaithful she always humoured him and treated him so well that before he died he was baptised into her Church and became a reformed man. He had never opposed Monica’s wish to bring her family up as Christians and he shared Monica’s pride in their precocious son and spent more that they could really afford on his education. Monica was known for her tact and gained the reputation of a family peacemaker among her friends and neighbours. She herself had first to make peace with a critical mother-in-law as well as her sometimes difficult husband, but a mixture of Christian patience and native diplomacy and common sense usually won the day.
Monica’s place in history is intimately linked to her son. Brilliant he might be, but wayward too. She was proud of his achievements but more concerned about his eternal salvation. She always loved him as a very special son, yet remonstrated with him when she thought it necessary and even for a time banned him from the family home when he first joined the Manicheaen sect. He was never far from her thoughts or her prayers. She was once consoled to be told by a bishop whose help she had solicited that «it cannot be that the son of these tears should perish». She followed him from Africa to Rome and then to Milan as he sought worldly promotion but seemed to be drifting farther from Monica’s Christian faith. He had been enrolled and signed as a catechumen from childhood but would be nearly 33 before his final dramatic conversion and baptism by St Ambrose at Milan. On the way back to Africa and a new age both for Augustine and, through him, for the Christian Church Monica took ill, her work now happily complete, at Ostia the port of Rome and soon after died, aged 56, in 387.
In his «Confessions» Augustine speaks of the ecstacy of Ostia, the moment when mother and son were rapt in contemplation as they talked about the life to come. A comment Monica made on her deathbed summed up her deep faith. When she heard a reference made about the sadness of her impending death when she was so far from her African homeland and the burial place of her beloved Patrick Augustine quotes those famous words: «Bury my body anywhere you like. Let no worry about that disturb you. I have only one request to make of you, that you remember me at the altar of the Lord, wherever you may be». «Nothing», she had said on another occasion, «is far from God, and there is no reason to think that he will not know me at the end of the world and raise me up».
We may not know every detail of Monica’s life, but we have enough in the «Confessions» to make us see why she is still remembered some sixteen centuries after her death at Ostia. As one writer put it, «Few mothers have had as great a biographer as St Monica, but few sons have had as great a mother as St Augustine».
After the Augustinians had established, on the 5th of May, the feast of the Conversion of St. Augustine in 1341, they did not waste time in establishing a memorial for his mother Monica the day before on the 4th of May. With these same criteria, the Roman calendar of 1969 moved his memorial to the 27th of August, because they don’t know the day of his death: therefore underlining the bonds which unite the mother and son.