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Saint Helena

Western calendar
18 August
Orthodox calendar
21 May, with her son Constantine (3 June on the old calendar)
Patron of
archaeologists, converts, difficult marriages

Helena was of humble birth, an inn-keeper or a stable maid in the old accounts, and Constantius Chlorus married her and later put her aside for a political match, but when her son Constantine became emperor he called her to his court and gave her the title Augusta. Eusebius writes that under his influence she became a devout servant of God, and in old age she went to the Holy Land, built basilicas at Bethlehem and on the Mount of Olives, and fed the needy of Jerusalem, at times serving them herself. East and West remember her above all for the finding of the Cross of Christ, and the Orthodox honour her with her son as equal to the apostles.

Sources

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Feast days, two calendars and patron saints

A saint’s feast day is the day each year when the Church remembers that saint in its worship, and for most saints it is the day they died. These are among the oldest days in the Christian year: after Easter and Pentecost, and Christmas and Epiphany in the fourth century, the next feasts the Church kept were those of the apostles and the martyrs.

Many saints have two dates in the finder because the Western and Orthodox Churches built their calendars separately over many centuries. Sometimes they remember the same saint on different days: the West keeps Saint Jude with Saint Simon on 28 October, while the Orthodox keep him on 19 June. Some Orthodox churches, such as the Russian Church, also still follow the old Julian calendar, which now runs thirteen days behind the one on our walls, so their 6 December falls on our 19 December. Where that happens the finder gives both dates.

A patron saint is a saint the Church has come to ask for help in a particular place, work or need, “a special intercessor with God and the proper advocate”, as the old Catholic Encyclopedia puts it. Some patronages were declared by a pope, as when Pius IX named Saint Joseph patron of the whole Church in 1870; most grew from long tradition, as with Saint Anthony and the things we lose.

We chose these two hundred saints by what people search for most, by name, by need and by date, and added the saints Orthodox Christians look for and the apostles. Every fact in an entry comes from a source we checked and name under it: the Catholic Encyclopedia, the Orthodox Church in America’s lives of the saints, Vatican News and the Holy See’s own documents. Where a saint’s story comes to us mostly from legend, the entry says so.