St. Helena

Mother of Constantine, empress, and pilgrim to the places of the Gospel

Helena was born to humble people in the eastern Empire, perhaps at Drepanum in Bithynia, about the middle of the third century. She became the companion of the officer Constantius and the mother of Constantine, and lived to see her son become emperor and the Church become free. In her last years she traveled to Palestine to pray at the places of the Gospel, and Christians have remembered her ever since as the empress who went on pilgrimage.

Ambrose calls her a stabularia, a keeper of an inn or a posting station, and nothing in the sources makes her noble. Whether she was the lawful wife of Constantius or his concubine is still debated. Their son Constantine was born at Naissus about 272. Around 289, when Constantius rose toward the imperial college, he put her aside to marry Theodora, the stepdaughter of the emperor Maximian, and for years Helena disappears from the record.

Constantine brought her back to his court. Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea who knew him, writes that she became a devout servant of God under her son's influence, which places her conversion after his victory at the Milvian Bridge in 312. In Rome she lived at the Sessorian palace near the Lateran, and coins struck from 324 give her the title Augusta.

About 326, though advanced in years, she traveled to the eastern provinces. Eusebius describes her giving money to soldiers and the poor, freeing prisoners and recalling exiles, and praying in the churches as an ordinary member of the congregation. She dedicated two churches, one at the cave of the Nativity in Bethlehem and one on the Mount of Olives, at the place of the Ascension. These are the things her contemporaries recorded.

Later tradition remembers more. Ambrose, preaching at Milan in 395, is the first to say that Helena found the Cross. Rufinus, a few years later, tells how three crosses were uncovered at Calvary and the true one made known by the healing of a dying woman, and later writers add the nails and the title. The Church has long kept this memory in her liturgy and art, and the basilica of Santa Croce in Rome grew from a hall of her palace where, tradition holds, she kept what she brought back from Jerusalem.

She died about 329, nearly eighty years old, with Constantine at her side; Eusebius does not say where. Her body was carried to Rome and laid in a mausoleum on the Via Labicana. Her great porphyry sarcophagus, moved to the Lateran in the Middle Ages, now stands in the Vatican Museums. Her relics were carried to the abbey of Hautvillers in Champagne in the ninth century, and Rome keeps relics of her in the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli.

Helena gave Christian pilgrimage its first imperial form: an old woman who crossed the Empire to pray where Christ was born, died and rose. The Roman Martyrology keeps her memory on August 18; the Eastern Churches honor her with Constantine on May 21.