The truth behind Valentine’s day will make you think twice!

Valentine’s Day is here with us once more, with plenty of people sure to panicky buy heart-adorned cards, bumper boxes of chocolate, bouquets of red roses and teddy bears. Now heavily commercialized and laden with expectation, the annual event is a once a day affair where people earnestly show their love and affection for another person.

The oldest surviving Valentine’s poem was written by a prison-entrapped, pining lover: Charles, Duke of Orleans wrote it for his wife in 1415, confined in the Tower of London after being captured at the Battle of Agincourt. However Valentine’s Day was celebrated for centuries before that.

Every February 14, couples across the globe typically recognize the annual celebration by exchanging gifts, flowers and cards, although it it isn’t a public holiday in every country.

While Valentine’s Day is now heavily commercialized, the church originally decided to make the day a Christian celebration to honour St Valentine. The feast of St Valentine of February 14 was first established in 496 by Pope Gelasius I.

While the details of who St Valentine was are greatly contested, one thing agreed upon is that he was martyred and buried on February 14 at the Roman cemetery on the Via Flaminia, the ancient road from Rome to Rimini.

However the details we have of St Valentine could be of one saint or two conflated saints with the same name; this means there are many different biographies in circulation.  The most popular legend is that St Valentine – a priest from Rome – was arrested after secretly marrying Christian couples, who were being persecuted by Emperor Claudius II in the third century AD.

As helping Christians was considered a crime, St Valentine was imprisoned; while in jail he attempted to convert the emperor to Christianity and was condemned to death. He was beaten with stones and clubs, before being beheaded outside the Flaminian Gate.

According to some, while in prison St Valentine fell in love with the jailer’s daughter and sent her a love letter signed ‘from your Valentine’ on February 14, the day of his execution, as a goodbye.

Wearing a coronet made from flowers and with a stencilled inscription, St Valentine’s skull now resides in the Chiesa di Santa Maria in Cosmedin, on Rome’s Piazza Bocca della Verità. A casket containing a number of St Valentine’s bones and a vial of his blood have been stored in the Whitefriar Street Church, in Dublin, since 1936, and couples regularly visit the religious shrine to ask him to watch over their lives.

Many couples preparing to get married also head to this church on February 14, the feast day of the saint, for a Blessing of the Rings in the presence of the reliquary.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *