St. Helena sends the Cross to Rome, into her own palace hall

ROME, around 330 AD — A portion of the wood of the Cross has come from Jerusalem to Rome in these years, and the empress Saint Helena has given it her own house. The wood was set down in a hall of the imperial palace she uses when she is in the city, out past the Lateran at the south-east corner. That hall is being walled into a church round the relic, for the faithful to come and venerate it.

St. Helena is the mother of the emperor Constantine, she holds the rank of Augusta, and she is about eighty. She travelled to Jerusalem in her old age, and according to longstanding Catholic tradition she found the Cross there on Calvary, and a nail with it. Very soon after the finding the wood was cut into small relics and sent out through the Christian world. A portion went to Constantinople and a portion to Rome, both to be set out for the faithful to venerate.

The ground is hers: an estate in the south-east corner of the city that holds the palace known as the Sessorium, a circus and a set of public baths. The baths have taken her name and are called the Thermae Helenianae (the baths of Helena). Inscriptions cut in her honour have been found on this ground, and they tie the estate to her. The palace is one of her residences, and she lodges there when she is in Rome.

The way in is a short walk east from the Lateran. The road runs out through the Esquiline, a district of houses at this edge of the city. It stops at the Aurelian Walls. The walls were built between 271 and 275 AD, and the oval Castrense amphitheatre stands built into them at this corner. Between the amphitheatre and the Porta Maggiore lies the estate. Its largest structure is a racecourse, the Circus Varianus, begun under the emperor Caracalla and enlarged by Elagabalus, who raced chariots there under his family name of Varius. It measured 565 metres by 125, nearly the size of the Circus Maximus. When the walls went up, around 271 AD, they cut the track in two, and the longer part was left outside the city and has not been used since. The baths stand beside it, and the palace beyond.

The hall is a large rectangle under a flat ceiling, lit by twenty windows, five to a side, with marble facing on the lower walls. The palace has its name from that room: Sessorium, from the Latin sedeo (I sit).

Constantine has paid for what stands in the hall now. He has set some of the wood of the Cross in it, enclosed in gold and jewels, and has dedicated the church under the name Hierusalem (Jerusalem). Four silver candlesticks burn before the wood, one for each of the four gospels, eighty pounds of silver in each. There are fifty silver chandeliers of fifteen pounds apiece, a silver altar of two hundred and fifty pounds, and gold and silver chalices, goblets and patens for the service. All the land around the palace has been made over to the church, with an estate on the Via Lavicana that brings in 263 gold solidi a year to keep it. The gift of the relic falls in the pontificate of Pope St. Sylvester.

Romans are calling the new church the Basilica Eleniana, Helena’s basilica, or the Sessoriana, after the palace. It keeps the relics of the Passion brought from Calvary. The name of the dedication has its reason: according to longstanding Catholic tradition, earth carried from Jerusalem was spread inside the building, and the ground inside the church is counted as Jerusalem’s.

Seventeen centuries later the hall is still a church and still holds the wood. It is Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, standing against the Aurelian Walls between the Lateran and the Porta Maggiore, with the ruin of the amphitheatre beside it and three streets meeting at its front, one of them the via Eleniana. The front is eighteenth-century work: Pietro Passalacqua and Domenico Gregorini built the oval atrium for Pope Benedict XIV, who had been the church’s own cardinal before his election. To the right of the apse is the Chapel of St. Helena, its vault set with a mosaic of Christ blessing, the Evangelists and four scenes of the Cross. Cistercian monks looked after the basilica from 1561 AD until 2009 AD; diocesan priests have it now.

The fragments of the Cross are kept upstairs, in the Chapel of the Relics reached by stairs from the left aisle. With them are the Titulus Crucis (the inscription from the Cross), a nail, two thorns, the finger of St. Thomas and a piece of the Good Thief’s cross. Pilgrims walking the Seven Churches of Rome on foot have come to this door since antiquity, and they still climb those stairs.