Who stole the Saint...

[BrotherBuzz]

in Saint Valentine's day? I seem to remember that was what we called it back in the stone age, but I don't know when the Saint part disappeared.

[Sanity Claws]

1. Wasn't he removed from the religious calendar?

About twenty to thirty years ago, the Catholic Church removed certain saints from its liturgical calendar because they were more legend than real. I remember St. Christopher was one of them. I think that's what happened to St. Valentine -- He's been de-haloed.

[BrotherBuzz]

2. I don't have a Catholic calendar....

but Saint Valentine's day is still on my cowboy calendar. Hey, the Catholics are nuts anyway because they made one of my ancestors a Saint. Sir Saint Southworth is even buried in a protestant church, Westminster Cathedral!



(does he look like Elvis Presley, or what?)

[Benhurst]

5. Westminster Cathedral in London is Catholic. It's the Abbey that is

protestant. If your ancestor is buried in the Cathedral, he's Roman Catholic. (Of course all those buried in Westminster Abbey before the Reformation were Catholic as well.)

[Az]

3. It had to be Ian Oglevy, Roger Moore, or Val Kilmer

If anyone gets this joke I will be impressed.

[BrotherBuzz]

4. I thought "The Prisoner" was good, too

;)

[Xithras]

6. The history of St. Valentines Day.

Was St. Valentine a real person? Probably.

Like Christmas and other Christian festivals, the origins of Valentines day actually go back to a Roman festival, Lupercalia. On February 15 young Roman men celebrated Lupercalia by drawing the names of young available women from a bucket, and the drawn women became the sexual partner of the male for up to a year (early on this was voluntary, but there's some evidence to suggest that this became forced sexual slavery, at least on a limited scale, by the end of the empire).

By the fifth century the Catholic Church had considerable control over Rome and decided to do away with Lupercalia once and for all. Because many people LIKED what was essentially a sexual holiday, the pope at the time dusted off an old legend about a Saint Valentine.

Allegedly, St. Valentine was a Roman priest in the early days under Emporor Claudius II. Claudius was apparently having problems raising armies, so he passed a law banning young men from marrying before they served in the Roman army. St. Valentine ignored that decree and continued to marry young Christian men and women anyway. He was eventually captured and executed.

The fifth century pope rededicated Lupercalia as the day of the feast of St. Valentine, when we were supposed to think about love, marriage, and other Christian concepts (no sex allowed though).

In the late 60's the Catholic Church revisited some of its holy days and scrapped a few with marginal historical footings. St. Valentine was never "stripped of his halo", but the day of his feast was removed from the calendar. The problem was that during the 1400 or so years between his sainthood and modern times, most of the records pertaining to his life and execution were lost, so little remains today other than some conflicting legends and a "moral story". This is complicated by the fact that there were apparently THREE St. Valentines from that time period, and the few records that do survive don't clearly delineate which activities were performed by which Saint. Since holy days are supposed to be where we honor the life and try to mimic the deeds of the saints, it was deemed improper to have one on the calendar for whom we actually knew so little about.

Since then, it's been a purely secular holiday, and it lost the "St." and its religious connotations as it's observance spread to people of other faiths (and of course, the faithless). Fifty years ago Valentines Day was pretty much only celebrated by Catholics and those who lived in Catholic dominated areas. Today it's pretty secular, and Valentines are given people of most faiths to those they admire.