Who was St. Monica?
Almost everything we know about Monica comes from her son. Augustine wrote about her in Book IX of his Confessions, some years after her death, and he did not write a saint's life. He wrote about a real woman. She was born at Tagaste in North Africa to Christian parents. The sources do not agree on the year: the Catholic Encyclopedia says 333, Vatican News 331, Franciscan Media about 330. Augustine himself says she died in the fifty-sixth year of her age, in 387, which puts her birth around 331.
Augustine tells one story from her girlhood that is easy to skip past. Sent to draw wine from the cask for her parents, she began sipping it, a little more each day, until she was drinking cups of it. A servant girl, in a quarrel, called her a wine-bibber. The insult cured her; she gave the habit up at once. Augustine records it because he wanted to show how God used an enemy's taunt to heal her, and Catholics who struggle with alcohol have taken her as a patron ever since.
Her parents married her to Patricius, an official in Tagaste. He was a pagan, and the Encyclopedia describes a violent temper and dissolute habits; Franciscan Media calls him licentious, and Vatican News says he was unfaithful. Franciscan Media adds that his mother lived with them. The Encyclopedia says she was of like disposition to her son; Augustine puts it more gently, saying she was turned against Monica at first by the whisperings of servants and won over by her patience. Monica did not fight him. She had learned, Augustine writes, that "an angry husband should not be resisted, neither in deed, nor even in word," and she waited for a calm moment to answer him. Other wives of the town, whose husbands were gentler, "carried the marks of blows on their dishonoured faces"; she did not. Patricius became a Christian near the end of his life; Franciscan Media gives his death as 371, a year after his baptism.
Then there was the son. Augustine was her firstborn, born when she was about twenty-two, and he gave her seventeen years of grief: an immoral life, in Franciscan Media's phrase, and the Manichean sect, whose teachings so distressed her that for a time she would not let him eat at her table. A vision reassured her. A bishop she begged for help told her, in the words the Encyclopedia preserves, that "the child of those tears shall never perish." When Augustine slipped away to Rome without telling her, she followed. He had gone on to Milan; she went on to Milan. There she found St. Ambrose, and there, at Easter 387, Ambrose baptized her son.
Why Catholics pray to St. Monica for a wayward child, a hard marriage, addiction and grief
No pope has declared Monica the patron of mothers, wives, alcoholics or difficult marriages. These patronages are traditional, and they come straight out of the Confessions. The Encyclopedia notes that in 1850 an association of Christian mothers was founded in Paris under her name, to pray for sons and husbands who had gone astray; Franciscan Media lists mothers, wives, alcoholics and conversion.
What draws people to her is the length of the wait. Franciscan Media calls her "a model of patience," and the word is exact. She prayed for Patricius for most of a marriage and for Augustine for seventeen years. She did not get a quick answer, and she did not stop. A mother whose son has left the Church, a wife whose husband drinks, a parent who has been praying for a child for a decade with nothing to show for it: these are Monica's people. She also knows grief. She buried a husband, and her own death came at the moment of her greatest joy.
That death is the other reason. A few days before she died, at Ostia, waiting for the ship home to Africa, she and Augustine stood at a window over a garden and talked about heaven until, he says, for a moment they touched it. Afterward she told him there was nothing left for her to do on earth. When her sons worried about burying her so far from home, she said: "Lay this body anywhere, let not the care for it trouble you at all." She asked only one thing, that they remember her at the Lord's altar. And to the question of whether she minded dying so far from Tagaste: "Nothing is far to God." She died on the ninth day of her illness. She was buried at Ostia; Pope Martin V had her relics brought to Rome in 1430, and they rest today in the Basilica of St. Augustine.
How to pray to St. Monica
Her memorial is August 27, the day before her son's, and the Church keeps it as a Memorial. A novena is usually made in the nine days before. Pray to her tonight, and tomorrow, and keep going. Augustine closes Book IX by asking everyone who reads it to remember Monica and Patricius at the altar. Do that: have a Mass offered for the person you are praying for, and go to it.
The prayer below is one to use when the news from your son or daughter is bad again. Say it, then tell her, in your own words, what has happened. Pair it with Confession when the worry has turned into anger at the person, and with the Eucharist.
If the trouble in your house is alcohol, prayer to Monica goes alongside help, not instead of it. Augustine's mother was cured of her own drinking by a servant's hard word. Call a doctor, a treatment program, or a group for families of drinkers, and keep praying while you do. If someone in the house is violent, call the police; Monica's patience with Patricius is not a reason to stay in danger.