Saint Valentine (also Valentinus) refers to one of several martyred saints of ancient Rome. The feast of Saint Valentine was formerly celebrated on February 14 by the Roman Catholic Church until a revised calendar was issued in 1969, pursuant to the Second Vatican Council.[2] His feast day is July 30 in the Eastern Orthodox Church.
His birth date and birthplace are unknown. Valentine's name does not occur in the earliest
list of Roman martyrs, which was compiled by the Chronographer of 354.
The feast of St. Valentine was first decreed in 496 by Pope Gelasius I, who included Valentine among those "... whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose
acts are known only to God." As Gelasius implied, nothing is known about the lives of any of these martyrs.
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the saint whose feast was celebrated on the day now known as St. Valentine's Day was possibly one of three martyred men named Valentinus[3] who lived in the late third century, during the reign of Emperor Claudius II (died 270):
Various dates are given for their martyrdoms: 269, 270, or 273.[4] The name was a popular one in late antiquity and is derived from valens,(worthy).[5] Several emperors and a pope bore the name,[6] not to mention a powerful gnostic teacher of the second century, Valentinius, for a time drawing a threateningly large following.
That the creation of the feast for such dimly conceived figures may have been an attempt to
supersede the pagan holiday of Lupercalia that was still being celebrated in fifth-century Rome, on February 15 is apparently a figment of the English eighteenth-century antiquarian Alban Butler, embellished by Francis Douce, as Jack Oruch conclusively demonstrated in 1981.[7] Many of the current legends that characterise Saint Valentine were invented in the fourteenth century in England, notably by Geoffrey Chaucer and his circle, when the feast day of February 14 first became associated with romantic love.
Earliest church dedications
It is believed that the priest of Rome and the bishop Valentinus are each buried along Via Flaminia outside Rome, at different distances from the city. Their calendar days of martyrdom have been
made to coincide.[8] In the Middle Ages, two Roman churches were dedicated to Saint Valentinus. One was the tenth-century church Sancti
Valentini de Balneo Miccine or de Piscina, which was rededicated by Pope Urban III in 1186.
The other, on the Via Flaminia, was the ancient basilica S. Valentini extra Portam founded by Pope Julius I (337‑352), though not under this dedication.[9] Though the basilica is quae apellantur Valentini, "which is called of Valentinus", early basilicas were as often
called by the name of their former patron as by the saint to whom they were dedicated: see titulus.
This, the earlier and by far more important of the churches, is dedicated to the less prominent
of the two saints, Valentinus, presbyter of Rome;[10] this was the Basilica S. Valentini extra Portam, the "Basilica of Saint Valentinus beyond the Gate" which was
situated beyond the Porta Flaminia (the Porta del Popolo, which was the Porta S. Valentini when William of Malmesbury visited Rome). It stood on the right hand side at the second milestone on the Via Flaminia.[11] It had its origins in a funerary chapel on the site of a catacombs, which Liber Pontificalis attributes to a foundation by Pope Julius I, who served 337-352: the dedications of two basilicas dedicated by Julius are not specified in
Liber Pontificalis, however. It was restored or largely rebuilt by Pope Theodore (642‑649) and Leo III (795‑816), enriched with an altar cloth by Benedict II (683‑685) and by gifts of Pope Hadrian I (772‑795), Leo III and Gregory IV (827‑844), so that it had become ecclesia mirifice ornata., "a church marvelously
enriched". The monastery of San Silverstro in Capite was annexed to it, and in the surviving epitome of a lost catalogue of
the churches of Rome, compiled by Giraldus Cambrensis about 1200, it was hospitale S. Valentini extra urbem, the "hospital of Saint Valentinus
outside the city". But in the thirteenth century the martyr's relics were transferred to San Prassede, and the ancient basilica
decayed: in Signorili's catalogue, made about 1425 it was Ecclesia sancti Valentini extra portam sine muris non habet sacerdotem,
"the church of Saint Valentinus beyond the gate without [enclosing] walls, has no priest".[12]
In the catacombs connected with the basilica of Valentinus, outside the Porta del Popolo, nineteenth-century excavations
unearthed two hundred Christian inscriptions.[13] Lanciani reported, from the chronicle of the monastery of S. Michael ad Mosam, an account of a pilgrim of the eleventh
century who obtained relics of saints "'from the keeper of a certain cemetery, in which lamps are always burning.'" He refers
to the basilica of S. Valentine and the small hypogaeum attached to it (discovered in 1887)"[14]
The earliest written Acta for Saint Valentinus were written in the sixth or seventh century, when the hagiographical genre was well established, with pious accounts of magic and torture shared among
many texts and applied to many martyr-saints. The longer of the two is that written of the martyr Valentinus of Terni and
his magical cure, through faith alone, of a crippled child. Bede, in the eighth century, knew of both hagiographies and included rescripts of both under 14 February
in his martyrology.[15]
[edit] In the Golden Legend
The Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine, compiled about 1260 and one of the most-read books of the High Middle Ages, gives sufficient
details of the saints and for each day of the liturgical year to inspire a homily on each occasion. The very brief vita
of St Valentine has him refusing to deny Christ before the "Emperor Claudius"[16] in the year 280. Before his head was cut off, this Valentine restored sight and hearing to the daughter
of his jailer. Jacobus makes a play with the etymology of "Valentine", "as containing valour".
The Legenda Aurea does not contain anything about hearts and last notes signed "from
your Valentine", as is sometimes suggested in modern works of sentimental piety [1]. Many of the current legends surrounding them appear in the late Middle Ages in France and England, when the feast day of February 14 became associated with romantic love.
[edit] Feasts and relics
[edit] St. Valentine's Day
-
Until 1969, the Catholic Church formally recognized a total of eleven Valentine's days. Besides
February 14, these include January 7, May 2, July 16, August 31, September 2, October 25, November 1 and November 3, November
11, November 13, and December 16. Valentin Faustino Berri Ochoa, whose saint's day is November 1, lived in the nineteenth
century. The Orthodox Church recognizes a somewhat different list of Valentine's days.[17]Jack Oruch has made a well-supported case[18] that the traditions associated with "Valentine's Day", well-documented in Geoffrey Chaucer's Parliament of Foules, and generally set in a supposed context of an old tradition, in
fact had no such tradition before Chaucer. The speculative explanation of sentimental customs, posing as historical fact,
had their origins among eighteenth-century antiquaries, notably Alban Butler, the author of Butler's Lives of Saints, and have been perpetuated even by respectable
modern scholars. Most notably, "the idea that Valentine's Day customs perpetuated those of the Roman Lupercalia has been accepted uncritically and repeated, in various forms, up to the present."[19] In the French fourteenth-century manuscript illumination from a a Vies des Saints[20] (illustration above), Saint Valentine, bishop of Terni, oversees the construction of his basilica at Terni; there is no suggestion here yet that the bishop was a patron of lovers.
In 1836, relics that were exhumed from the catacombs of Saint Hippolytus on the Via Tiburtina, then near (rather than inside) Rome, were identified with St Valentine; placed in a gilded casket,
they were transported to the Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in Dublin, Ireland, to which they were donated by Pope Gregory XVI. Many tourists visit the saintly remains on St. Valentine's Day, when the casket is carried in
solemn procession to the high altar for a special Mass dedicated to young people and all those in love. Alleged relics of
St Valentine also lie at the reliquary of Roquemaure in France, in the Stephansdom in Vienna and also in Blessed St. John Duns Scotus church in the Gorbals area of Glasgow, Scotland.There is also gold reliquary bearing the words 'Corpus St. Valentin, M' (Body of st. Valentine,
martyr) at The Birmingham Oratory, Uk in one of the side altars in the main church.
Of greatest interest at this altar is the rich coffin which lies beneath it, containing the
body of S. Valentine, a martyr whose relics from the Roman catacombs were given to Newman by Pope (now Blessed) Pius IX in
1847.[21]
The saint's feast day was removed from the Church calendar in 1969 as part of a broader effort to remove saints viewed by some as being of purely legendary origin.[22] The feast day is still celebrated within the Church on local calendars such as in Balzan and in Malta where relics of the saint are claimed to be found, and also throughout the world by Traditionalist Catholics who follow the older, pre-Vatican II calendar. Prior to the creation of the new calendar, the church in Rome that had been dedicated
to him observed his feast day by, among other things, displaying his reputed skull surrounded by roses.
The canonized bishop of Terni continues to be celebrated by the Eastern Orthodox Church on July 6.
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