St. Constantine the Great

Constantine was born around the year 272 in Naissus (modern Niš in Serbia), the son of the western Caesar Constantius Chlorus and the holy Helena, an innkeeper's daughter who had quietly been a Christian for most of her life. He grew up as a hostage at the court of Diocletian in the East, where he saw the great persecution of 303 with his own eyes: bishops imprisoned, churches burned, Scriptures put to the fire.

On the eve of the battle of the Milvian Bridge in October of 312, as he marched against his rival Maxentius for the rule of the Western half of the empire, Constantine saw a sign of the Cross in the sky at midday, together with the words ἐν τούτῳ νίκα, in this sign conquer. He placed the chi-rho on the shields of his army; he won the battle; and within months he had issued, together with his eastern colleague Licinius, the Edict of Milan, which gave the Church her freedom throughout the Roman world.

When he came to the sole rule of the empire in 324, he summoned the First Ecumenical Council to settle the Arian controversy. He paid the travel of the three hundred and eighteen Fathers from the public treasury; he opened the council in person with an oration in Latin; he assured the Fathers that whatever they decided would be the law of his empire; and at the close he kissed the scars of those who had been confessors in the recent persecutions before he kissed their bishop's rings.

He re-founded the old Greek town of Byzantium as a new Christian capital, Constantinople, the New Rome. He sent his mother St. Helena to the Holy Land, where she found the True Cross and built the great churches of the Anastasis at the Holy Sepulchre and of the Nativity at Bethlehem. He passed laws on the side of the Faith: the Lord's Day made a public rest, the cross adopted as the imperial standard, the crucifixion abolished as a punishment.

He delayed his own baptism, in the manner of many fourth-century Christians, until he was on his deathbed in 337. He was baptized at Nicomedia by Eusebius, the same bishop who had been the chief political patron of the Arian party at Nicaea, an irony the historians have not always known what to do with. He died on the Day of Pentecost, May 22, 337, in white baptismal garments. The Church glorified him equal-to-the-apostles, and keeps his memory with his mother St. Helena on May 21.