Thursday, May 21

Early Church · d. 337 and c. 330

SS Constantine and Helen, Equals-to-the-Apostles

First Christian emperor and his mother

Constantine, proclaimed emperor at York in 306, marched on Rome in 312 under a sign of the Cross seen (the accounts of Eusebius and Lactantius differ in detail) before the battle of the Milvian Bridge. With the Edict of Milan in 313 he ended the persecutions, and thereafter poured imperial energy into the Church: he convened the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325, built basilicas across the empire, and founded Constantinople as a new Christian capital. He deferred baptism, as many then did, until his deathbed in 337. His mother Helen, a woman of humble origin, made a great pilgrimage to the Holy Land in her old age, endowing churches at Bethlehem and the Mount of Olives; the beloved tradition of her finding the Precious Cross in Jerusalem appears in writers by the end of that century. The Church calls them Equals-to-the-Apostles.

Also Commemorated Today