You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute,

an Apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.

Welcome to Form Now. My name is Dr. Ben Acres. I'm the executive director of Formed, a professor at the graduate school.

Joining with me today is Dr. John Seahorn, a colleague and friend. We've taught here for the last five years together at the Augustine Institute, teaching theology and scripture.

And Dr. Gray is on vacation. He's

asked me to guest host. And today's topic, today's theme, we're going to be talking about St. Helena.

And you may or may not know anything about St. Helena, and that's what we're going to be talking about today.

St. Helena was the mother of Constantine. So you may have heard of the name Constantine in history. We're going to unpack this in some of the story.

But this story is almost like an Indiana Jones film. There's going to be excavations, there's archaeology, and it's going to all end up in the finding of the true cross. And that's one of the themes we're going to be talking about today is the finding of the true cross in Israel, but also in the finding of the cross in our own lives.

And so St. Helena, you may have, she's been popularized in a book by Evelyn Wall,

and Evelyn Wall has, it's a nice short book. He was very proud of that book. Most people

haven't read it if you've read some Evelyn Wall, it's considered one of his minor works.

But he tells a little bit of the history,

and a lot of this is speculation.

Some of this is shrouded in mystery.

But one of the things he talks about with St. Helena

is that she was a stable maid,

a virtuous stable maid that was wooed by Constanius Chloris,

the father of Constantine.

He seems to have maybe a divorced her.

Evelyn Wall and Louis de Wall and some other writers in England projected the theory that she was British.

So this is, it's actually interesting after Evelyn Waugh's book in England in the 1950s,

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