September 14 across 2,026 years of Catholic history

feature · JERUSALEM, 326 AD

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

The soldiers of the Jerusalem garrison dug through two centuries of packed earth, hauled in long ago to bury the place, until the rock-cut tomb appeared.

A wall painting of an elderly Roman empress in a pale tunic, purple mantle, pearls and a jewelled headband standing on broken ground with her right hand out, directing three workmen with a basket, a pick and a loaded cart, a bishop in a plain mantle beside her and a dark hollow cut into the ochre rock behind. — St. Helena on the cleared ground at Golgotha with St. Macarius, the bishop of the city. The temple of Venus has been pulled down, the earth beneath it carted away and the rock-cut tomb opened. Jerusalem, 326 AD.
About this picture
AI-generated image, in the manner of a late-Roman fresco of the Constantinian decades, from the paper's reference portrait based on Seated statue of Helena of Constantinople — head (Unknown Roman sculptor; head recut in the Constantinian period on an Antonine body. Photograph by Jebulon, body: second half of the 2nd century AD; head: Constantinian, c. 306-337 AD, Musei Capitolini, Rome) View source artwork.

Saint Helena, the mother of the emperor Constantine and about eighty years old, came east this year and was shown the place where Christ was buried. A working temple of Venus stood on it, and she ordered the building thrown down and the earth beneath it dug out and carted away. The soldiers of the Jerusalem garrison dug through two centuries of packed fill until they reached the rock-cut tomb.

4 min read

A small, gaunt friar in a hooded undyed tunic tied with a knotted rope kneels barefoot on a grey mountain ledge, hands drawn to his chest and face lifted toward an empty sky, with four small birds on the rock beside him and a stone chapel and hut behind him above a wooded valley. — About this picture
AI-generated image, in the manner of medieval Italian fresco painting of the Assisi cycle, from the paper's reference portrait based on Legend of St. Francis, scene 19: Stigmatization of St. Francis (Giotto di Bondone, 1297–1300 AD, Upper Church, Basilica of San Francesco, Assisi) View source artwork.

event · MOUNT LA VERNA, the Casentino, September 14, 1224 AD

On La Verna, the wounds of Christ open in St. Francis's flesh

St. Francis of Assisi came out of prayer on the side of Mount La Verna today with the wounds of the crucified Christ in his hands, his feet and his side. He had come up in August with three of his brothers to keep a forty days' fast and to find out what God wanted of him. He hid the marks, and it took Brother Illuminato to argue him into saying they were there.

4 min read

More in this edition

legacy · VATICAN CITY, September 14, 1975 AD

Pope Paul VI declares Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton a saint

Pope Paul VI canonized Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton in St. Peter's Square today, before a crowd put at between a hundred and fifty and two hundred and fifty thousand. He refused to give the usual account of her life, and spent the homily instead on the months in Italy in which she was widowed at twenty-nine and turned to the Catholic Church, and on what that step cost her at home. To her Sisters of Charity he gave the sentence she spoke two days before she died: 'Be children of the Church.'

4 min read

A young woman in a striped headscarf and dark shawl, seated with one hand resting in her lap, looks slightly to the side in a sepia-toned photograph.

writings · LOURDES, France, September 14, 2008 AD

A Pope reads out the errand a fourteen-year-old was given at Lourdes

At the Mass for the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the apparitions of Our Lady at Lourdes, Pope Benedict XVI opened not with his own words but with the message St. Bernadette Soubirous was given at the grotto on March 2, 1858 AD. Pilgrims have never stopped coming since, he said. He came back twice to the girl who carried the message: to the sign of the Cross Our Lady made before St. Bernadette could make it, and to what she was when Our Lady chose her.

3 min read

A painted scene in which a slight, dark-haired boy in a plain belted wool tunic and hose stands on a stony road outside a small stone church, a cloth bundle in one hand and a closed clasped book under his arm, while two older canons in white tunics and black cloaks wait in the round-arched doorway and the walled city with its open gate rises behind him. — About this picture
AI-generated image, in the manner of a Trecento buon fresco, from the paper's reference portrait based on St Anthony of Padua, from the fragments of a double-sided dossal from San Francesco al Prato, Perugia (Master of Saint Francis, c. 1272 AD, Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria, Perugia) View source artwork.

place · LISBON, Portugal, this month, 1210 AD

At fifteen, Saint Anthony of Padua leaves home for the canons

A boy of fifteen walked out of his father's house in Lisbon this month and asked to be taken in by the priests living under a common rule outside the city walls, the Canons Regular of St. Augustine at St. Vincent's. He is St. Anthony of Padua, still known here by his baptismal name, Ferdinand, and going in cost him his place in his family and every claim on what it owned. He asked at the door more than once before the canons gave him the habit.

Today in the Church

The Exaltation of the Holy Cross

Saint of the day

The Exaltation of the Holy Cross

The Church keeps today the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, the Cross on which Christ was crucified, which the Roman Martyrology records as found at Jerusalem.

On this day in the Church

1654 Six days after the death of St. Peter Claver, the corporation of Cartagena went in a body to the Jesuit church with the cathedral musicians and celebrated a magnificent service for the priest who had worked the city's slave wharves for forty-four years.Source
1894 Céline Martin entered the Carmel of Lisieux with a camera, and forty-one of the forty-seven authenticated photographs of her sister St. Thérèse of Lisieux were taken with it.Our report Source
2001 An Ordinary General Chapter of the Order of Saint Augustine elected Father Robert Francis Prevost, the future Pope Leo XIV, Prior General of the order.Saint Monica Source

Quote of the day

“For the cross destroyed the enmity of God towards man, brought about the reconciliation, made the earth Heaven, associated men with angels, pulled down the citadel of death, unstrung the force of the devil, extinguished the power of sin, delivered the world from error, brought back the truth, expelled the Demons, destroyed temples, overturned altars, suppressed the sacrificial offering, implanted virtue, founded the Churches.”

— St. John Chrysostom, preaching to his congregation, Homily on Matthew 26:39, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 9 (q-0134)