Today, 14 September, the Church keeps the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. It is worth weighing how strange the word is before anything else. To exalt is to raise up high, to put on show. And what is raised is an instrument of torture — the most humiliating gallows Rome knew how to use, kept for slaves and rebels. Nobody in the first century would have worn one round the neck.
326: Helena in Jerusalem
Tradition places in 326 the journey of Saint Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine, to the Holy Land, and the finding of the Cross beneath the pagan temple Hadrian had raised over Calvary to blot out the memory of the place. The fill meant to bury the memory is what preserved it.
335: the date that stayed
The feast, however, does not come from the finding: it comes from a church dedication. On 13 and 14 September 335 the basilicas built by Constantine over Calvary and the tomb were consecrated — the Martyrium and the Anastasis.
On the second day the relic was lifted up before the people by the bishop, so that all could see it. It was that gesture — the raising of the Cross in sight of the crowd — that gave the feast its name and the date we still keep.
In 614 the Persians of Chosroes II sacked Jerusalem and carried the relic off. Fifteen years later the emperor Heraclius defeated them and brought it back.
The story goes that he wanted to carry it himself along the Via Dolorosa, in purple and crown — and could not take a step. The patriarch Zacharias is said to have warned him that such a weight did not go with such a costume. Heraclius stripped off the purple, took off the crown and the shoes, and then carried the Cross.
The scene may well have grown in the telling. But what it teaches is exact, and it is what the whole feast says: the Cross is not carried wearing a crown.
Why the Church glories in a gallows
- Because it was there the debt was paid. The Cross is not venerated as timber: it is venerated as the place where what happened, happened.
- Because Saint Paul said it first. “But far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Gal 6:14) — the verse today’s antiphon comes from.
- Because it changes the sign of everything that hurts. After Calvary no suffering is mere waste. This does not make pain smaller; it makes it habitable.
- Because tomorrow belongs to her. The Church puts Our Lady of Sorrows on the 15th, hard against this feast, on purpose. First the Cross; then the one who stood beside it.
The hymn that has been sung for fifteen hundred years
Around 569 a relic of the Cross arrived at Poitiers, sent to Saint Radegund. To receive it, Venantius Fortunatus wrote two hymns — the Vexilla Regis and the Pange lingua gloriosi proelium certaminis. The stanza below is from the second, and the Church sings it on Good Friday and on this feast.
Crux fidélis, inter omnes arbor una nóbilis: nulla silva talem profert, fronde, flore, gérmine. Dulce lignum, dulces clavos, dulce pondus sústinet.
Faithful Cross, alone among all trees in nobility: no forest brings forth its like, in leaf, in flower, in fruit. Sweet the wood, sweet the nails, sweet the weight it bears.
Amen.
“But far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.”— Galatians 6:14
“O Cross, our only hope.”— Vexilla Regis, Venantius Fortunatus
“The Cross is the school of love.”— ascribed to Saint Maximus of Turin
The antiphon of the day
Nos autem gloriári opórtet in cruce Dómini nostri Iesu Christi: in quo est salus, vita et resurréctio nostra; per quem salváti et liberáti sumus.
We should glory in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ: in him is our salvation, our life and our resurrection; through him we are saved and set free.
Amen.
Adoramus te, Christe, et benedicimus tibi, quia per sanctam crucem tuam redemisti mundum. We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you, because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.
- The Most Holy Name of Mary — on the 12th.
- Words of the saints — a growing collection, in English and Portuguese.
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