St. Helena, whose feast is today, is a patroness of those who give charitably. From the Catholic Encyclopedia: “Her princely munificence was such that, according to Eusebius, she assisted not only individuals but entire communities. The poor and destitute were the special objects of her charity. She visited the churches everywhere with pious zeal and made them rich donations. It was thus that, in fulfilment of the Saviour’s precept, she brought forth abundant fruit in word and deed.”

Her origins were humble, but she rose to empress after her son Constantine the Great became the first Christian emperor. St. Helena is most celebrated, of course, for journeying to the Holy Land in search of the True Cross.

The British novelist Evelyn Waugh, who considered his bookHelena the best work he ever did, wrote this about her in Saints for Now, a collection of essays commissioned and edited by Clare Boothe Luce::

“We have no absolute certainty that she found it. The old sneer, that there was enough ‘wood of the cross’ to build a ship, though still repeated, has long been nullified. All the splinters and shavings venerated everywhere have been patiently measured and found to comprise a volume far short of a cross. We know that most of these fragments have a plain pedigree back to the early fourth century.

“But there is no guarantee which would satisfy an antiquary of the authenticity of Helena’s discovery, if she found the True Cross, it was direct supernatural aid, not by archaeological reasoning. That, from the first, was its patent of title….

“Constantine [was] not yet baptized, still fuddled perhaps by dreams of Alexander, not quite sure that he was not himself divine, not himself the incarnation of the Supreme Being of whom Jove and Jehovah were alike imperfect emanations; Constantine was quite out of his depth. The situation in the Church was more perilous, though few saw it, than in the days of the persecution.

“And at that crisis suddenly emerged God-sent from luxurious retirement in the far north, a lone, resolute old woman with a single concrete practical task before her; to turn the eyes of the world back to the planks of wood on which their salvation hung.

“The Cross is very plain for us today; plainer perhaps than for many centuries. What we can learn from Helena is something about the workings of God; that He wants a different thing from each of us, laborious or easy, conspicuous or quite private, but something which only we can do and for which we were each created.”

More about St. Helena here.