She's about eighty, and she just gave her palace away

ROME, around 330 AD — St. Helena is about eighty years old. She is the mother of the emperor Constantine, and she holds the rank of Augusta. A piece of the wood of the Cross has come all the way from Jerusalem to Rome. She has given it her own house.

Cut small and sent out

St. Helena travelled to Jerusalem when she was already old. 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.

One piece went to Constantinople. One piece went to Rome. Both were to be set out for the faithful to venerate.

The room with twenty windows

The Roman piece was set down in a hall of the imperial palace. St. Helena stays there when she is in the city, out past the Lateran at the south-east corner. The ground is hers. Her estate holds the palace called the Sessorium, a racecourse and a set of public baths. The baths are named after her — the Thermae Helenianae (the baths of Helena).

The hall is a big rectangle under a flat ceiling. The lower walls are faced with marble, and there are twenty windows, five to a side. The palace gets its name from that room: Sessorium, from the Latin sedeo (I sit).

And now that hall is being walled into a church round the relic. The faithful can come in and venerate it.

Gold, jewels and fifty silver chandeliers

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. He has given the church the name Hierusalem (Jerusalem).

Four silver candlesticks burn in front of the wood, one for each of the four gospels. Each one holds eighty pounds of silver. There are fifty silver chandeliers of fifteen pounds apiece, and a silver altar of two hundred and fifty pounds.

All the land around the palace has been made over to the church. An estate on the Via Lavicana brings in 263 gold solidi a year to keep it.

The ground counts as Jerusalem

Romans are calling the new church the Basilica Eleniana, which means Helena’s church. Others call it the Sessoriana, after the palace. It keeps the relics of the Passion brought from Calvary.

According to longstanding Catholic tradition, earth carried from Jerusalem was spread inside the building. That is the reason for the name Hierusalem: the ground inside the church is counted as Jerusalem’s.

Seventeen centuries later the hall is still a church, and it still holds the wood. It is Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, standing against the Aurelian Walls between the Lateran and the Porta Maggiore. The fragments of the Cross are kept upstairs, in the Chapel of the Relics. Stairs go up to it from the left aisle. Pilgrims walking the Seven Churches of Rome on foot have come to this door since ancient times. They still climb those stairs.