The majority of significant feast days in the Catholic faith pay tribute to particular saints who were influential in a historical, cultural or religious context. On these feast days, we venerate the saints, remember their lives and invoke their prayers from Heaven on our behalf.
September 14, however, features the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross—not a person, and not a celebration of a particularly important liturgical event. So, what exactly are we feasting about?
The answer may seem obvious—we are honoring the Cross upon which Christ was crucified. Primarily, we are honoring Christ’s saving action through His death on the Cross, but we’re also attending to the actual instrument of the Crucifixion. The means of His death are important—not only because of His sacrifice, but also because of the fulfillment of numerous prophecies relating to His death, which solidify Jesus as the Messiah and reform our understanding of the Old Testament, in that God became man in order to “fulfill” the law and the prophecies.
For example, Isaiah prophesies that Jesus will be “pierced for our transgressions” (Isaiah 53:5), while Galatians describes why the Cross itself participates in the saving action: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole’” (Galatians 3:13), which was written in Deuteronomy 21:23. There are many more prophecies that were fulfilled by the particular circumstances of Christ’s death; thus, we can see why the Cross itself was essential.
The Exaltation of the Holy Cross, however, is not only about the symbology and prophecy of the Paschal Mystery. The feast also commemorates the discovery of the True Cross by Saint Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine, during her travels to the Holy Land from 326 to 328 A.D.
According to various historical sources—primarily Eusebius—Jerusalem was almost totally destroyed in 70 A.D. at the end of the First Jewish-Roman War. Emperor Hadrian ordered a reconstruction of the city in 130 A.D. under the name Aelia Capitolina, with many historical Jewish sites being replaced with Roman temples. This exacerbated tensions between the Romans and the Jews, leading to the Bar Khokba revolt in 132 A.D., which lasted approximately three years. The revolt ended with the deaths of around 600,000 Jews and the destruction of nearly 1,000 Jewish settlements, while many surviving Jews were displaced or enslaved. Hadrian renamed the region to Syria Palaestina in an attempt to remove Judea from memory, and all Jews were banned from entering the new Roman settlement Aelia Capitolina, erected on the ruins of Jerusalem.
Hadrian did not distinguish between Christians and Jews. Just as the Jewish historical sites were destroyed, Hadrian leveled the top of Mount Calvary to build a temple to Venus. He also built a temple to Jupiter over the location of Christ’s tomb.
Saint Helena converted to Christianity at the age of 63 in 313 A.D., thanks to her close relationship with her son, Constantine the Great, and is credited with establishing several Catholic churches in the Holy Land and demolishing the temple to Venus. According to tradition, Saint Helena—together with Saint Macarius of Jerusalem, the Bishop of the Holy Land at the time—excavated the area below the former temple, and it is there that three crosses were found. It is unknown if these crosses were the same as those from Jesus’ crucifixion, but the connection was undeniable. In order to determine the provenance of the True Cross, Saints Helena and Macarius reportedly had a terminally ill woman brought to the site, and upon touching the third cross, she was miraculously healed.
Saint Helena consequently ordered that a church be built on the site, and on September 14, 335 A.D., the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was dedicated by Constantine. To this day, the Stations of the Cross on the Via Dolorosa—the route which Jesus took to Golgotha —concludes at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Eastern Churches celebrate The Exaltation of the Holy Cross to this day, marking the anniversary of this basilica’s dedication, but it did not begin appearing on the Western calendar until after the seventh century.
The True Cross remained in Jerusalem after the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre until the city was invaded by Persians in 614 A.D. Byzantine Emperor Heraclius claimed to have recovered the True Cross after the invasion, in 628 A.D., and returned it to Jerusalem on September 14, 629 A.D.—further adding to the significance of the date—and sealed its remains in a reliquary within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Some scholars dispute the legitimacy of Emperor Heraclius’ claim that he returned the True Cross, but regardless whether the True Cross is still interred at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Saint Helena’s contributions to the growth of the Catholic Church through her recovery of Christian holy sites and establishment of new churches around the world cannot be overstated—and so, we can also celebrate her on September 14.
