SEVENTY-FIRST SERMON
ON THE HOLY EMPRESS HELEN A MOTHER OF CHRISTENDOM.
Subject.
St. Helen is a mother of Christianity in general, and especially of the Christians of Treves: 1. In the Christian training of her spiritual children; 2. Inasmuch as she has left a rich spiritual inheritance to her children. Preached on the feast of St. Helen.
Text.
" Behold thy mother." (John 19:27)
Introduction.
Great Queen of heaven, Mary! these words are, properly speaking, for thee, for in them thy dying Son, Jesus Christ, addressed St. John, and in his person all Christians, and gave thee to them, after His death, as their Mother. " Behold thy mother." Yes, most blessed Virgin! we acknowledge and honor thee with the deepest reverence as the dearest spiritual mother of us all; for thou didst bring forth into the world our elder Brother who, by His merits, brought us forth again to heaven, and made us adopted children of His Father. We acknowledge thee with joy as our most loving Mother, who in heaven hast a motherly care of us, thy children, entrusted to thee; and it is by thy hand that all graces flow down on us from thy Son. Meanwhile, allow me to-day to apply the same words in a spiritual sense to another whose anniversary as foundress we now celebrate with a festival of joy and thanksgiving: I mean the holy Empress Helen. " Be hold thy mother." City and land of Treves, behold thy spiritual mother, who can be justly called so in the sense in which St. Paul calls himself the father of the Galatians: " My little children, of whom I am in labor again, until Christ be formed in you." l This St. Helen might with reason say to us, as I mean to show in this panegyric.
Plan of Discourse.
St. Helen is a mother of Christians in general, and especially of the Christians of Treves. Such is the whole subject. A careful mother in the Christian training of her spiritual children; the first part. A kind mother in the rich spiritual legacy she has left her children; the second part. Let us act as true children of such a mother; the conclusion.
Give us Thy grace, Lord, to do this latter, through the intercession of Thy Mother, Mary, and of the holy angels.
The first and chief care of a mother is the training of her children, for she must feed, clothe, and teach them to walk and speak. And this duty devolves more on the mother than on the father, for the latter, being obliged to attend to his daily business, has no time for his children's education. But this duty is common to all mothers, even among Turks and heathens. What h am I saying? Even unreasoning wild beasts do not yield a whit to human beings in this respect, for they use the greatest care, according to their natures, to bring up their young properly. Far more is required from a Christian mother, in which, too, the father is obliged to help; for the parents must bring up their children for their last end, for God and heaven, and therefore must teach them the true fear of God, and how to lead a really Christian life. Where this training is wanting or deficient the parents are not true Christians, or, as St. Bernard says, " they are robbers and seducers of their children." Yet, alas! there are many Christian households in which this training is reckoned of the least importance. St. Chrysostom says: " Some bring up their sons to be soldiers, others provide them with riches, others with honors; none provide their children with God." They are taught how to dress, how to adorn themselves, how to salute others and pay compliments, how to behave in company, and to act towards others; they are taught gambling, dancing, fencing, and all sorts of languages and sciences; but no one provides them with God, no one thinks much of the things that concern God and their souls, and sometimes those things are neglected altogether.
But I must not complain any longer! I have to preach a panegyric, and to speak of St. Helen as a perfect model of a holy mother in the training of her children; of Helen as the general mother of all Christians. Let us consider her conduct, and learn how to train children in a becoming manner from her example. Her chief and greatest care was to impress the life and holiness of Jesus Christ on the souls of her subjects: " Until Christ be formed in you." To that end she began with herself, and labored to make her inward and outward life conformable to that of the Son of God. For she knew well that the best means of urging others to good was to be good herself, and that generally it is in vain to expect children to be dutiful and pious when the father and mother do not give them proper example. She knew that a superior is looked up to by the common people as the citizens of a town look up to the town clock; if that gees wrong all order is disturbed in the place. Therefore the holy empress led her flock on by her own example to the Christian virtues more than by mere words.
St. John Chrysostom writes as follows of her and her son Constantine: " The pious emperor and his royal mother taught their subjects by their own example how to lead good lives; and as they were the greatest in the empire in authority, so they were greater still by the force of their example." " That holy em press," says St. Ambrose, like Magdalene at the feet of Our Lord, " depended in all things on the bishops," to learn from them the word of God and true devotion; " she always carried the gospel of Christ with her, that wherever she went she might by reading and meditating on it renovate her spirit, and be impelled to imitate the life of Christ. Nothing else did she bear in her heart or on her lips, like St. Paul; nothing else did she desire to know but Jesus Christ crucified. To preach Him and make Him known she wandered over the world, although she was a weak woman, and endeavored to bring all people to the knowledge and love of Christ. Therefore she was justly called by St. Paulinus "a teacher of the faith, of religion, and of piety.
In the tenth chapter of the Third Book of Kings we read that the queen of Saba came with a great retinue to Jerusalem to visit the wise Solomon; a figure, says St. Augustine, of our holy mother: " This empress of ours, Helen, came with the nations of the whole earth to Christ, the true Solomon, that all nations might learn what she had already learned."; The queen of Saba brought to Solomon as a present a hundred and twenty talents of gold, and a great quantity of spices and precious stones: " She brought to Christ innumerable souls, more precious than gold and gems. And as that queen introduced into her town and whole land the law of Moses she had learned from Solomon, so Helen introduced the Christian faith into her own city of Treves, into Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and the whole Roman empire from east to west; partly having it preached for the first time, partly spreading and preserving it. Helen was that woman of whom the parable in the Gospel of St. Matthew speaks: "The kingdom of heaven is like to leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, until the whole was leavened. Of which passage St. Ambrose writes thus: The Lord Jesus is the wheat; His gospel teaching, which seemed insipid to the carnal Jews, is the leaven; and who is the woman who hid it within herself, and communicated it to others? " She is Helen, who, of all queens and empresses, was the first to spread throughout the world the holy gospel of Christ, which, on account of its humility, is compared to leaven." "Oh," cries out St. Chrysostom in transports of joy, "how great was the fervor of the early Christians, inflamed as it was by the charity of Helen! " By her were opened schools of Christian wisdom, "and all peoples learned how to live according to the law of Christ, in the cities, and even in the woods and mountains." By her the churches were supplied with bishops, the altars with priests, the pulpits with preachers, " so that all held the word of God in the utmost esteem." For all were ashamed to neglect what they saw practised and listened to so attentively by such a great emperor and such a holy empress. " If you had been present you might have seen as many angels as Christians, and a heavenly life led on earth." So far the words and testimonies of the holy Fathers.
"Behold thy mother; " city and land of Treves, nay, all Christendom, behold thy mother! Behold the spiritual mother who has brought you forth to Christ! See and acknowledge with what holy teaching, with what a godly example she has trained up Christians as her children for heaven! Would to God that a similar zeal for winning souls to Christ and furthering His divine honor burned in us all, and that all of us would do our best to spur on our neighbor, if not by teaching and exhortation, at least by good example, to the service of God! Opportunity enough is offered for this to any one who sincerely loves God, and who is not content with being merely just for himself, but wishes to appear before the Lord in heaven with a great number of souls whom he has gained for God. This is specially meant for you, Christian superiors, parents, fathers, and mothers! You are set by the Almighty as pastors over the souls of your inferiors, children, domestics, that you may do all in your power to urge them to good, restrain them from evil, and bring them with you to heaven. But as have on other occasions spoken in detail about this obligation I now pass on again to our St. Helen. As we have seen, she was a provident mother of all Christians in the training of her spiritual children; and at the same time she was a beneficent mother on account of the rich inheritance she left her children, as we shall see in the
Second Part.
Generally speaking, the greatest care of parents is to leave their children an inheritance. To this end are directed most of their cares and labors; for this they work day and night; for this they often deny themselves in many things; for this they do without many a comfort and pleasure which they otherwise have means enough to indulge in; their sole desire is to spare expense, that they may have all the more to leave their children and heirs. Yet they cannot know certainly for whom they are saving, and often they leave their property to children who misuse the wealth so laboriously accumulated by their well-meaning parents, and make it serve only as a means to their own eternal ruin by their reckless extravagance. I cannot disapprove of this care on the part of parents. I only wish that they all took as much care as Christians should to leave their children a real legacy of true virtue and the fear of God!
How did our holy mother Helen act in this respect? She wandered over the whole Roman empire nay, so to speak, over the whole world, to collect vast treasures, that she might leave them to her Christians and descendants as an eternal inheritance after her death. What treasures were they? That question is answered by the charitable foundations, the magnificent temples, the beautiful cathedrals and other churches which she erected at her own cost and richly endowed foundations of which the eastern world has many an instance here and there. The church at the crib in Bethlehem, the church on Mount Thabor, the celebrated temple on Mount Calvary in Jerusalem, the many churches in Constantinople, Rome, and other cities are too far for us to take them in evidence. To come nearer home, we are told of her piety by the dumb pillars and towers of the churches she built in neighboring towns: by the celebrated so-called gold en church of St. Gereon in Cologne, which was formerly covered with pure gold; by that of SS. Cassius and Florentius in Bonn; by that of St. Victor in Zante, and, to say nothing of many others, by this great cathedral in which we are now assembled in her honor, dedicated to the holy apostle St. Peter all so many visible proofs of the motherly generosity of Helen. In a word, as St. Ambrose says: "She adorned the eastern empire with churches; " and we may say that, with her son Constantine, she did as much in the western parts of the world as far as the empire and her authority extended in that direction. That is an inheritance that will never die out; an inheritance that is for the spiritual good and salvation of her descendants, and their children after them; an inheritance by which the Almighty is daily praised in hymn and prayer by servants consecrated to Him, and by which the Christian people are fed with the word of God, and encouraged to lead Christian lives.
The same is said by the holy and precious treasures of relics
that Helen with great trouble and unwearied diligence collected
and placed in the different churches she caused to be built.
Again I need not mention foreign lands; here in Treves we have
to thank her for the bodies of the holy apostles Matthias and
Philip, for the holy nail by which Our Lord was fastened to the
cross, and for that costly and invaluable treasure the holy coat
of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ which alone would have
sufficed to make the name of Treves known over the whole world
if it were not known already; which princes and kings and count
less numbers of people from all nations have come here to see, and
which makes the archdiocese of Treves an object of holy envy
to all other countries. The whole Christian Church must thank
Helen for the sacred emblem of triumph the cross on which the
Son of God suffered death for the salvation of the world, which,
as we know, Helen sought, found, and left to the world for its
consolation; an inheritance that could not be paid for with all
the goods the world has in its possession.
But the best of all the legacies we owe this mother, my dear
brethren, and one that we should all succeed to, is the example
of her virtues and holy life. " My little children, of whom I am
in labor again, until Christ be formed in you " ( so you must
imagine the holy Empress and mother Helen calling out to us
constantly), "besides the other goods you have received from me,
I have left you the example of my life; keep it always before
your eyes, that you may regulate your lives according to it. I
have left you the example of my zeal for the divine honor and
the faith, which I have spread and planted everywhere; of my
burning love of God, which drove me over the whole world in
order to announce and make known His name and doctrine; of
my patience and desire for the cross, for I bore with resignation
ill-treatment from my husband, and other crosses, as well; of my
humility, for I laid aside my imperial diadem to wait on and
serve on bended knees virgins consecrated to God; of my generosity and liberality to the poor, whom I sought out in every
place I went to,, and whom I helped with money and in other
ways, too. These are the virtues of which I give you the example, that you may imitate them; so that as I have always
tried to make my life as conformable as possible to that of Christ,
you also may do the same, until Christ be formed in you, and
His holiness shine forth in all your behavior and actions.
"Behold thy mother;" behold, I repeat, Christians of Treves! But let me change those words a little: Holy mother Helen, here are thy children; dost thou recognize them all as thine? Dost thou see in them all the footsteps of thy holy life? the conformity of their manners with thy teaching and example? the holy use of the rich inheritance of foundations thou hast left behind in all those who enjoy them? If that is so, then I wish them all joy from my heart! But perhaps thou mightest complain of some as St. Paul did of the Galatians, whom he called his children: " I would willingly be present with you now, and change my voice, " and say clearly that you are not my children, "because I am ashamed for you." For there are some of you of whom I am ashamed; some who do not follow my teaching, who show little resemblance to the example I have left them, who belong only in name and outward appearance to the faith I have planted and spread and preserved among you; who attend only to the vain usages of the world, and the false maxims of worldlings, and live according to them, setting aside the humble, holy gospel of Jesus Christ that I always carried about with me. I am ashamed of you! No; I do not acknowledge you as my children! What a disgrace for us, my dear brethren, if we gave reason to our good and careful mother to utter such a complaint of us!
I hope that such is not the cast Changing the words of St. Chrysologus, let us put on the likeness of our mother; let us all endeavor to imitate her virtues and holy life. Holy mother and Empress Helen! what now remains for us to do is to pay thee the debt of deep gratitude we owe thee, and to show thee the homage and give thee the praise that thy whole city of Treves is now occupied in rendering thee; and at the same time show thee constant devotion and love, and a childlike confidence in thy intercession and protection. Truly, thou canst now do far more as a princess in heaven than when thou wert a mortal em press on earth. We commend to thee, then, this diocese and the whole city of which thou hast in a special manner shown thyself the mother. Obtain for us from the Monarch of monarchs and the Emperor of emperors, by thy intercession, that we may always be true to Him, and be and remain zealous in His service until that happens which thou didst so eagerly long for, namely, until Christ is formed in our lives in the most perfect manner. Amen.