Saint Helena, at eighty, orders a temple demolished and uncovers Christ's tomb

JERUSALEM, 326 AD — Under the temple of Venus at Golgotha, below a mound of earth that had been hauled in and paved over two centuries ago, the soldiers digging this year found the tomb of Christ. The woman who had ordered them to dig is about eighty: Saint Helena, the mother of the emperor. She came east this year, was shown the place where the Saviour suffered, and found a working temple of the state religion standing on it; she ordered the temple pulled down and the earth under it dug out and carted off.

The temple was not a ruin and not an accident. After the passion, Christians came to the tomb and venerated it. Men who hated Christianity hauled in earth from a distance, covered the whole spot and paved it over. On the platform they built a shrine of Venus with her image set up in it, so that anyone who came to pray at the tomb of Christ would appear to be bowing to Venus. The little hill of Golgotha, where the Lord was crucified, stood a short distance from the tomb, and it went under the same earth. The Emperor Hadrian, two centuries ago, had run a great terrace round the place, walled it, and planted a grove to Jupiter and Venus on top of it.

What St. Helena wanted was the ground underneath. What held it was a temple still in use, with offerings being made on its altars. Pulling down a temple like that was beyond a provincial governor or a general, and in all the time it had stood, no governor, no military commander and no emperor had touched it. Her son, Constantine, had beaten his last rival, Licinius, in 324 AD. From then on he ruled the empire alone, and his was the only authority that could take a temple of Venus off its platform.

She decided to make the journey after that victory, as an act of devotion to God, the King of kings. She went to look for the cross on which the Redeemer suffered. The journey was hard on a woman of her age, and she made it at speed anyway. Eusebius, her son’s biographer, wrote that she was old by then and unusually wise, and that she had come to give thanks and to pray for her son and for her grandsons. Of her time in the Holy Land he wrote that she “explored it with remarkable discernment”.

What she found was desolation: Jerusalem, or what had once been Jerusalem, lying waste, with its Christian ground buried under the terrace. Saint Macarius, the bishop of the city, had already had men digging to establish where the holy places lay. When St. Helena was shown the site she decided to restore it as a Christian shrine, and she ordered the temple destroyed at once. St. Macarius worked alongside her from then on. Constantine’s order put the labour behind hers: every soldier of the garrison at Jerusalem was sent to clear away the temple, the grove and the terrace.

The soldiers threw the shrine down to the ground, and the statues inside it with it. They hauled the stone and the timber well away from the site. Taking the building off the hill did not reach the tomb, because the ground the temple stood on was two centuries of earth brought in to bury the place. So Constantine gave the order to dig that ground out to a considerable depth and cart the soil off to somewhere distant.

They dug down through the fill until the old surface of the ground appeared, and the tomb was in it: the hollowed rock of the Saviour’s resurrection, where nobody had expected it to be. The search had been long and the digging hard, and St. Helena found it by God’s help.

According to longstanding Catholic Tradition, the digging she had ordered turned up three crosses buried near the sepulchre, and with them the tablet on which Pilate had written that the crucified Christ was king of the Jews. One of the three was the Cross of Christ and the other two those of the thieves crucified beside him. Nobody at the site could tell which was which, and it troubled St. Helena. St. Macarius had the three carried to a woman of rank who had been ill a long time and was by then close to death. He had each one touched to her while he prayed. The first two changed nothing, and when the third touched her she was healed and stood up.

Word that the tomb had been uncovered reached Constantine, and he wrote to St. Macarius. The tomb had lain hidden under the earth for centuries, he wrote, and had come to light only now, and nothing he knew of was as astonishing. “The grace of our Saviour is so wonderful,” Constantine wrote, “that no words are adequate to express the present marvel.” He wanted a church on the cleared ground, and he told the bishop what it had to be: a building “incomparably superior to the most beautiful structures in every city throughout the world”. That church rose over the place of the sepulchre, and St. Helena named it New Jerusalem and set it facing the old and deserted city.

St. Helena did not wait for the masons. With her son’s money and the authority of the empire behind her, she went on to build at Bethlehem, over the cave where Christ was born. She built again on the ridge of the Mount of Olives, where he was taken up to heaven. She had both churches dedicated at once.