St Monica gets rather a raw deal. Everyone is so mesmerised by her son, Augustine, that she only seems to exist in reference to him. She is commemorated as a widow, yet the story of her marriage to the pagan Patricius, a difficult and demanding man, rather than her widowhood, is surely the story of her sanctification. In her younger years, she struggled with a drink problem; in her later years, she struggled with philosophy and theology in order to be able to engage with her brilliant but wayward son. It would be interesting to know how far their discussion of Ambrose's sermons drew Augustine away from Manicheism.

Augustine wrote poignantly about their last meeting at Ostia and rightly attributed the grace of his own conversion, as well as that of his father, to his mother's prayers and influence. The Church, by and large, has remembered only her prayers, but Monica is a good example of a tough-minded woman with a generous heart, remarkably clear-eyed about her family's shortcomings but firm in faith and patient under all the blows that life dealt her. She is the patron saint of married women, mothers and alcoholics. Her heaven is obviously a busy one.