St. Helena

St. Helena was the mother of the emperor Constantine, born around 246 to 250 in the Roman East and dead around 330. She was of humble birth, was the consort of the officer Constantius who later became emperor, was set aside by him for a politically useful marriage, and returned to prominence only when her son took power. In her late seventies she travelled to Palestine, where churches were built at the sites of Christ's birth, ascension and burial under her patronage and her son's authority.

The story that she discovered the True Cross is not in the earliest account of her journey. It appears in sources from the 390s, roughly sixty years after her death, and the sections below set out exactly what the record says and when. What is not in doubt is that a very old woman with imperial money spent the end of her life marking the ground where the Gospel happened.

The Empress and Archaeologist

St. Helena (c. 250-330) was the mother of Emperor Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor of Rome. Born a commoner, she was divorced by her husband Constantius so he could marry a woman of noble blood for political advancement. Helena lived in obscurity until her son became emperor and restored her to the court with the title of Augusta (Empress).

She converted to Christianity in her later years and used her immense influence and wealth to build churches and support the poor. But she is best known for her pilgrimage to the Holy Land in her 80s.

The setting aside happened around 289, when Constantius was rising and needed a marriage into the imperial family; he married Theodora, the stepdaughter of the emperor Maximian. Helena disappears from the record for roughly two decades. She reappears after her son Constantine was proclaimed emperor in 306, was given the title Augusta in the mid 320s, and had coins struck in her name.

Finding the True Cross

Helena went to Jerusalem with a mission: to find the holy sites of Christ's life, which had been buried under pagan temples by the Romans. She ordered the excavation of the site of Calvary.

Tradition tells that they found three crosses buried in the ground. To determine which was the True Cross of Christ, the Bishop of Jerusalem had a dying woman touch each one. The first two produced no effect, but when she touched the third, she was instantly healed. Helena built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre over this sacred spot.

That is the traditional account, and it is set out below alongside what the earliest surviving sources actually record, which is not quite the same thing. The excavation itself is historical: the site of Calvary and the tomb had been covered over by a Roman temple platform, and it was cleared on Constantine's orders in the 320s, after which the great basilica of the Holy Sepulchre was built there.

Builder of Basilicas

Besides the Holy Sepulchre, Helena was responsible for building the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem (over the cave of Jesus' birth) and the Church of Eleona on the Mount of Olives. She is considered the first Christian archaeologist.

Those two foundations are the ones the earliest source names. Eusebius of Caesarea, writing his life of Constantine within a few years of the events, describes Helena's journey and says she dedicated two churches, one at Bethlehem over the cave of the Nativity and one on the Mount of Olives at the place of the Ascension, called the Eleona. He also describes her almsgiving, her release of prisoners and her gifts to soldiers and to the poor of the cities she passed through.

In Rome she is associated with the church now called Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, built into the Sessorian Palace, which was her residence in the city. Earth from Jerusalem is traditionally said to have been laid under its floor, which is where the name comes from, and relics of the Passion have been kept there since antiquity.

A Late Convert

Helena proves that it is never too late to do great things for God. Her conversion happened later in life, yet her impact on the geography of the faith was monumental. She is the patron saint of converts, difficult marriages, and archaeologists.

Eusebius says that her son brought her to the knowledge of Christ, which would place her conversion after 306 and probably in the years around his own turn to Christianity. She would have been in her sixties. Everything she is remembered for was done after that, in the last two decades of a long life, most of which had been spent in obscurity after being discarded.

Quotable Wisdom

Though we have few direct quotes, her life speaks a clear message: "Seek and you shall find." She sought the physical traces of Christ to strengthen the faith of the world.

The phrase is the Lord's, from the Sermon on the Mount, where he tells the disciples to ask, to seek and to knock (Matthew 7:7). No sayings of Helena survive. What survives is a route, a set of building sites, and a habit of giving money away in every city she stopped in.

Who She Actually Was

Helena was born about 246 to 250, most probably at Drepanum in Bithynia, on the Asian side of the sea near Constantinople. Constantine later rebuilt that town and renamed it Helenopolis in her honour, which is the main evidence for her birthplace.

Her origins were low. St. Ambrose, preaching about her at the end of the fourth century, calls her a stabularia, a stable-keeper or innkeeper's servant, and he says it approvingly, as proof of what God does with people the world overlooks. Ancient sources disagree about whether her union with Constantius Chlorus was a legal marriage or a recognised concubinage, which was a normal arrangement in Roman society and left the children in an ambiguous position.

Her son Constantine was born around 272, most likely at Naissus in the Balkans, the modern Niš in Serbia. When Constantius was raised to the rank of Caesar he set Helena aside and married Theodora.

She died about 330. Eusebius says her son was with her at the end. She was buried in Rome, in a mausoleum on the Via Labicana, and her enormous porphyry sarcophagus survives in the Vatican Museums.

What the Earliest Sources Say About the Cross

This is the part of Helena's story where the honest account is more interesting than the smooth one.

Eusebius of Caesarea wrote his Life of Constantine shortly after the emperor's death in 337. He describes Helena's journey to Palestine in detail. He describes the clearing of the site of the tomb and the building of the basilica. He does not say that Helena found the cross, and he does not mention a discovery of the cross at all.

St. Cyril of Jerusalem, writing in the 350s, says that the wood of the cross had been found and that fragments of it had already been distributed widely from Jerusalem. So a relic identified as the cross was known and dispersed within a generation of the excavation. Cyril does not connect it to Helena.

The link between Helena and the finding of the cross first appears in surviving texts in the 390s. St. Ambrose preached it in his funeral oration for the emperor Theodosius in 395, and the church historians Rufinus, Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret give versions of the story shortly afterwards, with the three crosses and the test by healing. From then on the story is universal.

Two conclusions follow and both should be stated. Something identified as the cross was found at Jerusalem in the 320s or 330s and was being venerated by the 350s. The attribution of that discovery to Helena personally is a tradition that shows up about sixty years after her death, in several independent-looking forms at once, and it cannot be traced further back in the sources we have.

Whether the wood was the cross of Christ is a separate question that no source can settle. The Church has never proposed the authenticity of any relic as a matter of faith, and a Catholic is free to venerate the cross without holding a position on the timber.

The Legend That She Was British

An English tradition makes Helena the daughter of a British king, usually identified with Old King Cole of Colchester. It has no historical foundation. The story appears in medieval British writing and was spread by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century, whose History of the Kings of Britain is a work of literature rather than of history.

The confusion has a traceable root. Constantine was proclaimed emperor at York in 306, on his father's death in Britain, so the family had a genuine British moment, and medieval English writers built a birth-story onto it. Colchester still uses Helena in its civic arms and legend.

The evidence points east, to Drepanum in Bithynia, which Constantine renamed for her. That is a much better kind of evidence than a chronicle written eight centuries later.

The Relics of the Cross, and Hers

By the second half of the fourth century, fragments identified as the wood of the cross were spread across the Roman world, and Cyril of Jerusalem says so plainly. The largest portion remained at Jerusalem, where it was displayed for veneration on Good Friday; the pilgrim Egeria describes that ceremony in the 380s in vivid detail, including the deacons guarding the wood because a pilgrim had once bitten off a piece.

Relics of the Passion associated with Helena's collection are kept at Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome. The Church's practice with relics is one of veneration rather than of certified provenance, and Catholic teaching honours the relics of the saints and the instruments of the Passion without making any claim of historical proof depend on them.

Helena's own remains have a contested history. She was buried in the mausoleum on the Via Labicana in Rome, and her sarcophagus was later moved; her relics have been claimed since the Middle Ages by the abbey of Hautvillers in France and by the church of Sant'Elena in Venice, and the competing claims cannot be resolved from the evidence. The sarcophagus itself is in the Vatican Museums.

Feast Days East and West

In the Roman calendar St. Helena's day is 18 August. In the Byzantine churches she is honoured together with her son on 21 May as Saints Constantine and Helen, Equal to the Apostles, a title reserved for those whose work is judged to have spread the faith on an apostolic scale.

The cross she is associated with has its own feast, the Exaltation of the Holy Cross on 14 September, which is connected historically to the dedication of the basilica of the Holy Sepulchre in 335 and later to the return of the relic to Jerusalem by the emperor Heraclius in the seventh century. The Church also venerates the cross publicly on Good Friday in the liturgy of the Passion, which is the oldest and most important expression of this devotion.

Patronage and Devotion

Helena is invoked as a patron of converts, of difficult marriages and of divorced people, of archaeologists, and of new discoveries. The marriage patronage comes straight from her life: she was set aside by a man who needed a better connection, and she lived with that for twenty years.

Devotion to her is strongest in the Christian East, where her feast with Constantine on 21 May is a major day and the name Eleni is among the commonest women's names in Greece, and in the churches and shrines associated with the True Cross across Europe. Our page on the saints and how the Church recognises them explains the Catholic practice of asking a saint's prayers.

Why the Church Holds Her Up

The Church holds up Helena for taking the Incarnation literally.

Christianity claims that God entered history at a place, under a named governor, and died on a specific piece of ground outside a specific city wall. Helena acted on that. She went to the place, cleared what had been built over it, and marked it so that other people could go there too. Everything the Church does with pilgrimage, relics and holy places follows from the same conviction, which is that matter and geography carry real weight in salvation because the Word was made flesh.

She is also held up for what she did with a second chance. Set aside, obscure, elderly, and then given access to the resources of an empire, she spent them on churches and on the poor rather than on herself. Eusebius, who had no reason to invent it, records the almsgiving as carefully as the buildings.

And she stands for the cross itself, which Paul says is folly to those who are perishing and the power of God to those being saved (1 Corinthians 1:18), and in which he says he will boast and in nothing else (Galatians 6:14).

What to Take From St. Helena

Late is not too late. She was in her sixties when she became a Christian and in her late seventies when she made the journey she is remembered for.

Go to the place. Pilgrimage is not required of anybody, and it changes people who make one. A shrine, a cathedral, a monastery within driving distance will do.

Spend the influence you have on something that outlasts you. Her buildings are still standing and still in use seventeen centuries later.

Take the humiliation without letting it define you. She was discarded for a better marriage and spent two decades in obscurity, and there is no trace of bitterness in anything recorded about her afterwards.

Venerate the cross on Good Friday. It is free, it takes a moment, and it is the oldest form of the devotion she is attached to.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. Helena?

St. Helena was the mother of the emperor Constantine, born around 246 to 250, most probably at Drepanum in Bithynia, and dead around 330. She was of humble birth, was the consort of Constantius Chlorus and was set aside by him around 289, and returned to prominence when her son became emperor in 306. In her late seventies she travelled to Palestine, where churches were founded at the sites of Christ's birth, ascension and burial.

Did St. Helena really find the True Cross?

The earliest account of her journey, by Eusebius of Caesarea shortly after 337, describes her churches and her almsgiving and says nothing about a discovery of the cross. Cyril of Jerusalem, writing in the 350s, says the wood of the cross had been found and distributed, without naming her. The story linking Helena to the discovery first appears in surviving sources in the 390s, with Ambrose's funeral oration for Theodosius in 395 and the church historians shortly after.

Which churches did St. Helena build?

Eusebius names two: the church over the cave of the Nativity at Bethlehem and the Eleona on the Mount of Olives at the place of the Ascension. The basilica of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem was built on Constantine's orders after the site was cleared of the Roman temple platform covering it. In Rome she is associated with Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, built into the Sessorian Palace, which was her residence.

Was St. Helena British?

No. The story that she was a daughter of a British king at Colchester comes from medieval British writing and was spread by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century. The evidence points to Drepanum in Bithynia, which her son Constantine rebuilt and renamed Helenopolis in her honour. The British legend probably grew from the fact that Constantine was proclaimed emperor at York in 306.

When is St. Helena's feast day?

In the Roman calendar her day is 18 August. In the Byzantine churches she is honoured with her son on 21 May as Saints Constantine and Helen, Equal to the Apostles. The cross has its own feast, the Exaltation of the Holy Cross on 14 September, and is venerated publicly in the Good Friday liturgy.

What is St. Helena the patron saint of?

She is invoked as a patron of converts, of difficult marriages and of divorced people, of archaeologists, and of new discoveries. The marriage patronage comes directly from her life, since she was set aside by Constantius so that he could make a politically advantageous marriage and lived in obscurity for about two decades afterwards.