For those of you who haven’t read the Confessions of St. Augustine, St. Monica, is remembered as the gracious doctor’s mother. She prayed for Augustine for over seventeen years, that he would be converted to the true faith. As the phrase usually goes: Augustine wouldn’t have been a saint unless Monica had.
The episode reminds me of a story wherein Pope Paul VI upon becoming bishop offered his episcopal ring to his mother to kiss. In turn she put her wedding ring in his face and said “if I did not have this, you would not have that”, and the bishop kissed her ring in a humorous reversal.
She is the patroness of all praying mothers, and perhaps all people in desperate prayer.