Jerusalem dedicates the church at Calvary and the church over Christ's tomb

JERUSALEM, Roman Palestine, September 13, 335 AD — The two churches the Emperor Constantine built at Jerusalem were consecrated to God here today, and the solemnity runs on through tomorrow. One of them stands at Golgotha, the little hill where the Lord was crucified, and the people of the city call it the Great Martyrium. The other stands about a stone’s throw away, over the crypt where the Lord’s body was laid and from which he rose on the third day, and is called the Anastasis (the Resurrection). The day was chosen to fall on the day the Cross of the Lord had been found — according to longstanding Catholic tradition, in the digging St. Helena ordered on this ground nine years ago.

St. Helena, the mother of the emperor, came to Palestine in 326 AD, at nearly eighty, and found the old city desolate. The tomb of Christ was buried under a mound of earth with a temple of Venus standing on it, put up by enemies of the faith to put an end to the veneration of the tomb. She ordered the temple thrown down and the earth carried away, and the tomb was uncovered. According to longstanding Catholic tradition, three crosses were found buried near it, and everyone there held it as certain that one of them was the Cross of the Lord and the other two those of the thieves crucified with him. She died in 330 AD, and did not live to see the buildings finished.

Her son had ordered them built on a scale to match the place. Writing to St. Macarius, the bishop of Jerusalem, Constantine told him the basilica must be “incomparably superior to the most beautiful structures in every city throughout the world.” The Great Martyrium was completed about the thirtieth year of his reign, and he judged the festival of that anniversary the right occasion for the dedication.

The bishops who consecrated it were summoned at short notice. They had been called together at Tyre, in Phoenicia, to settle a quarrel among the churches of Egypt. Marianus, the emperor’s shorthand notary, came to Tyre with a letter ordering them to leave for Jerusalem without delay and consecrate the church. Constantine required their disputes to be adjusted first and all discord purged before they came, on the ground that men at variance have no business offering a gift to God. They left Phoenicia together and travelled on the public post.

They came from further off than Phoenicia. The bishop of the chief city of Macedonia came, and bishops from Pannonia and Moesia, from Persia, Bithynia and Thrace, from Cilicia and Cappadocia. Others came from Syria, Mesopotamia, Arabia, Palestine, Egypt and Libya, with the monks of the Thebaid, and crowds from every province followed them. An imperial escort travelled with them, and officers sent from the palace had orders to add to the splendour of the festival at the emperor’s expense. Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, who came for the dedication, called the assembly the greatest he knew of after the council at Nicaea ten years ago.

Constantine did not come to Jerusalem. Marianus received the bishops in his place, lodged them and fed them at banquets, and gave out money and clothing to the destitute and food to men and women who had been going without. The emperor sent costly ornaments and gifts of his own into the church.

The consecration was carried through in prayers and sermons. Some of the bishops spoke on the emperor’s devotion to the Saviour and on the magnificence of the building he had raised; others expounded passages of Scripture. Bishop Eusebius spoke more than once, describing the building in detail and drawing out from the prophets the meaning of the symbols it displayed.

The anniversary of these days became a feast at Jerusalem, kept for eight days, with baptisms administered during them and people coming from every region under the sun to visit the holy places. Forty or fifty bishops came, with many of their clergy. Monks and lay people gathered from Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt and the Thebaid, and from every province besides.

The Church keeps September 14, the second of the two dedication days, as the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, and the commemoration of the Finding of the Cross was at first kept together with it. Egeria, a pilgrim who kept the dedication feast at Jerusalem two generations later, set down why the day had been chosen: “it was so ordained that, when the holy churches above mentioned were first consecrated, that should be the day when the Cross of the Lord had been found, in order that the whole celebration should be made together, with all rejoicing, on the self-same day.”