"Helena was visited that emperors might be redeemed." ~ The ancient sources on Saint Helena's discovery of the True Cross

Early 9th century illustration from northern Italy of Saint Helena discovering the True Cross.

The feast day of Saint Helena, the mother of Constantine, is commemorated by Catholics on August 18. Aside from her role as matriarch of the Constantinian dynasty, Helena is most remembered today for her finding of the True Cross of Jesus Christ. This discovery took place during Helena's celebrated pilgrimage to the Holy Land near the end of her life, during which time she undertook the task of uncovering the sites associated with Christ's life and passion and the building of commemorative shrines.

Eusebius Pamphilus, Helena's contemporary and bishop of Caesarea Maritima, records many of Helena's deeds during this trek. Curiously, he does not mention her discovery of the True Cross. For this, we must seek another early source, and one even more illustrious than the historian Eusebius: Saint Ambrose of Milan. 

In his eulogy on the death of Theodosius the Great, a man whom he had once barred from the Sacred Liturgy due to his very public sins, Ambrose provides a lovely interlude commemorating Helena. He uses her discovery of the True Cross, along with the nails of the crucifixion, to relay a moral lesson on the difference between the Christian Roman Emperors who are restrained in their actions by the tenets of Christianity, and the pagan emperors who were encumbered by no such restraints:

Blessed was Constantine with such a mother!...The mother, solicitous for her son to whom the sovereignty of the Roman world had fallen, hastened to Jerusalem and explored the scene of the Lord's Passion....

Helena, then, came and began to visit the holy places. The Spirit inspired her to search for the wood of the Cross, She drew near to Golgotha and said: "Behold the place of combat: where is thy victory? I seek the banner of salvation and I do not find it. Shall I," she said, "be among kings, and the cross of the Lord lie in the dust? Shall I be covered by golden ornaments, and the triumph of Christ by ruins? Is this still hidden, and is the palm of eternal life hidden? How can I believe that I have been redeemed if the redemption itself is not seen?"...

And so she opened the ground and cleared away the dust. She found three fork-shaped gibbets thrown together, covered by debris and hidden by the Enemy. But the triumph of Christ could not be wiped out. She hesitated in her uncertainty. She hesitated, as a woman, but the Holy Spirit inspired her to investigate carefully, because two robbers had been crucified with the Lord. Therefore, she sought the middlebeam, but it could have happened that the debris had mixed the crosses one with another and that chance had interchanged them. She went back to the text of the Gospel and found that on the middle gibbet a title had been displayed, 'Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.' Hence, a sequence of sound reasoning was established and the Cross of salvation was revealed by its title. This is what Pilate answered to the Jews who petitioned him: "What I have written, I have written," that is: "I have not written these things to please you, but that future ages may know them. I have not written for you, but for posterity," saying, as it were: "Let Helena have something to read whereby she may recognize the cross of the Lord."

She discovered, then, the title. She adored the King, not the wood, indeed, because this is an error of the Gentiles and a vanity of the wicked. But she adored Him who hung on the tree, whose name was inscribed in the title...

She sought the nails with which the Lord was crucified, and found them. From one nail she ordered a bridle to be made, from the other she wove a diadem. She turned the one to an ornamental, the other to a devotional, use. Mary was visited to liberate Eve; Helena was visited that emperors might be redeemed. So she sent to her son Constantine a diadem adorned with jewels which were interwoven with the iron of the Cross and enclosed the more precious jewel of divine redemption. She sent the bridle, also. Constantine used both, and transmitted his faith to later kings. And so the beginning of the faith of the emperors is the holy relic which is upon the bridle. From that came the faith whereby persecution ended and devotion to God took its place....

But I ask: Why was the holy relic upon the bridle if not to curb the insolence of emperors, to check the wantonness of tyrants, who as horses neigh after lust that they may be allowed to commit adultery unpunished? What infamies do we not find in the Neros, the Caligulas, and the rest, for whom there was nothing holy upon the bridle? 

What else, then, did Helena accomplish by her desire to guide the reins than to seem to say to all emperors through the Holy Spirit: "Do not become like the horse and mule," and with the bridle and bit to restrain the jaws of those who did not realize that they were kings to rule those subject to them? For power easily led them into vice, and like cattle they defiled themselves in promiscuous lust. They knew not God. The Cross of the Lord restrained them and recalled them from their fall into wickedness. [Fathers of the Church, Vol. 22, Funeral Orations, pp 325-331]

Ambrose's eulogy for Theodosius was written about 70 years after the death of Helena.

Additional details on the discovery of the True Cross are provided by (among others) Hermias Sozomen in his Ecclesiastical History, which was written approximately 120 years after the death of Helena: 

...The emperor [Constantine] rejoiced exceedingly at the restoration of unity of opinion in the Catholic Church [following the Council of Nicaea], and desirous of expressing in behalf of himself, his children, and the empire, the gratitude towards God which the unanimity of the bishops inspired, he directed that a house of prayer should be erected to God at Jerusalem near the place called Calvary. 

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At the same time his mother Helena repaired to the city for the purpose of offering up prayer, and of visiting the sacred places. Her zeal for Christianity made her anxious to find the wood which had formed the adorable cross. But it was no easy matter to discover either this relic or the Lord's sepulcher, for the Greeks, who in former times had persecuted the Church, and who, at the first promulgation of Christianity, had had recourse to every artifice to exterminate it, had concealed that spot under much heaped up earth, and elevated what before was quite depressed, as it looks now, and the more effectually to conceal them, had enclosed the entire place of the resurrection and Mount Calvary within a wall, and had, moreover, ornamented the whole locality, and paved it with stone. They also erected a temple to Venus, and set up a little image, so that those who repaired there to worship Christ would appear to bow the knee to Venus, and that thus the true cause of offering worship in that place would, in course of time, be forgotten. And that as Christians would not dare fearlessly to frequent the place or to point it out to others, the temple and statue would come to be regarded as exclusively appertaining to the Greeks. 

At length, however, the place was discovered, and the fraud about it so zealously maintained was detected. Some say that the facts were first disclosed by a Hebrew who dwelt in the East, and who derived his information from some documents which had come to him by paternal inheritance. But it seems more accordant with truth to suppose that God revealed the fact by means of signs and dreams, for I do not think that human information is requisite when God thinks it best to make manifest the same. 

When by command of the emperor the place was excavated deeply, the cave whence our Lord arose from the dead was discovered. And at no great distance, three crosses were found and another separate piece of wood, on which were inscribed in white letters in Hebrew, in Greek, and in Latin, the following words: "Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews." These words, as the sacred book of the Gospels relates, were placed by command of Pilate, governor of Judæa, over the head of Christ. There yet, however, remained a difficulty in distinguishing the Divine cross from the others. For the inscription had been wrenched from it and thrown aside, and the cross itself had been cast aside with the others, without any distinction, when the bodies of the crucified were taken down. For according to history, the soldiers found Jesus dead upon the cross, and they took him down, and gave him up to be buried, while, in order to accelerate the death of the two thieves, who were crucified on either hand, they broke their legs, and then took down the crosses, and flung them out of the way. It was no concern of theirs to deposit the crosses in their first order, for it was growing late, and as the men were dead, they did not think it worth while to remain to attend to the crosses. 

A more Divine information than could be furnished by man was therefore necessary in order to distinguish the Divine cross from the others, and this revelation was given in the following manner: There was a certain lady of rank in Jerusalem who was afflicted with a most grievous and incurable disease. Macarius, bishop of Jerusalem, accompanied by the mother of the emperor and her attendants, repaired to her bedside. After engaging in prayer, Macarius signified by signs to the spectators that the Divine cross would be the one which, on being brought in contact with the invalid, should remove the disease. He approached her in turn with each of the crosses, but when two of the crosses were laid on her, it seemed but folly and mockery to her for she was at the gates of death. When, however, the third cross was in like manner brought to her, she suddenly opened her eyes, regained her strength, and immediately sprang from her bed, well. It is said that a dead person was, in the same way, restored to life. 

The venerated wood having been thus identified, the greater portion of it was deposited in a silver case, in which it is still preserved in Jerusalem: but the empress sent part of it to her son Constantine, together with the nails by which the body of Christ had been fastened....

The above incidents we have related precisely as they were delivered to us by men of great accuracy, by whom the information was derived by succession from father to son; and others have recorded the same events in writing for the benefit of posterity. [Sozomen: Ecclesiastical History, Book II, Chapter 1]

Regular readers of this blog know that Helena is among my favorite saints. Here are a couple other posts about her:

• Helena's role in Constantine's execution of Crispus and Fausta
• Review of Saint Helena and the True Cross by Louis de Wohl

Book Review: Father Michael McGivney and the Knights of Columbus by Emily Tennant

Fr. McGivney hurries through inclement weather on a sick call.

For many years I have appreciated and enjoyed the Vision series – a sequence of biographical novels about the lives of the saints and Catholic heroes written especially for younger readers. The series commenced in the hoary antiquity of the 1940s and has continued over the decades, featuring a variety of authors—some of whom, like Louis de Wohl for example, were writers of supreme talent.

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Several of the books in the series have been reviewed by your humble blogger over the years, among them books on Saint Helena, Blessed Miriam Teresa Demjanovich, and Saints Louis and Zelie Martin. The last two mentioned were recent additions to the series written by GinaMarie Tennant, an author, organist and music teacher who grew up in a large homeschooling family. Perhaps not surprisingly, this same family has produced another writing talent, Emily Tennant, who is the author of the brand new title in the Vision series, Father Michael McGivney and the Knights of Columbus.

What a tremendous idea it was to write this novel. As a Fourth Degree Knight myself, of course I had heard of Fr. McGivney. But I would be lying if I said I knew much about him before reading Miss Tennant’s historical novel about his life. Father McGivney comes across in the work as a man of shining parts who emerged from a humble yet virtuous family to become a humble yet virtuous priest.

As portrayed by Miss Tennant, Fr. McGivney’s life reminded me of that of his rough contemporary, Saint Therese of Lisieux. He lived his own “little way”, performing the menial tasks of a Catholic priest with great fervor and wearing himself out physically in the process. Much like St. Therese, Fr. McGivney died young, entering eternal life at the age of 38.

But also similar to St. Therese, Fr. McGivney’s small acts would be transformed by God in His own good time into tremendous works that impacted millions of people. I doubt that Fr. McGivney realized in 1890 when he died, that the Catholic mutual aid society he created known as the Knights of Columbus, would eventually grow into the charitable leviathan that it has become today, with over 2 million members worldwide.

Father Michael McGivney and the Knights of Columbus is an eminently readable little novel, and is ideal for the young Catholic audience for whom it is intended. The prose is mostly light-hearted and fun. Of course, there are scenes of tragedy that play out throughout the story, but these all coalesce as the rationale for Fr. McGivney’s vision of the Knights of Columbus. In those days, when the father of a young Catholic family passed away, his wife and children often became wards of the state, to be separated among orphanages and other charitable organizations. Fr. McGivney founded the Knights to provide life insurance and other aid to such Catholic families in their moment of need.

The aspect of this novel that I appreciated the most, however, was the author’s attention to historical detail. The book includes a wealth of minor personal anecdotes from Father McGivney's life that lend a distinct flavor of authenticity to the work. As I read, I found myself wondering, “What is the significance of this passage?” As Miss Tennant explains in the Author's Note at the end, nearly all of these seemingly insignificant events were drawn directly from Father's correspondence or church archives—even the many humorous prizes that Father McGivney wins at the various Church fairs came from the old records. 

Steeped as it is in the Catholic history of the United States in the mid-19th century, Father Michael McGivney and the Knights of Columbus is an ideal book to read aloud with your kids. If you are a Knight of Columbus or have one or several in the family, this book should definitely be on your bookshelf.