Valentine’s Day. Fact, Fiction, and Hearts.

As I sit down to write this, it’s Valentine’s Day, the day of love, hearts, flowers, and of course, chocolate, in heart-shaped boxes. The “Valentine” in Valentine’s Day isn’t that chubby little guy with the bow. That’s Cupid. While he shows up a lot on cards and pictures every February 14, to understand Valentine’s Day, we need to start with a little history.

According to the Wikipedia entry on St. Valentine: “The feast of St. Valentine was first established 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.”

Allow me to translate that quote from Gelasius. Nothing was known, even then, about the lives of any of these martyrs. The words, “known only to God,” kind of spells it out. And so, the existence of a historical figure named St. Valentine is debated to this day, and there is limited information about him.

Some sources suggest that he may have been a Christian martyr who was executed in ancient Rome in the 3rd century AD, while others argue that the stories associated with him may be a conflation of multiple individuals, a kind of chimera among saints, if you will. Despite the uncertainty surrounding his existence, St. Valentine has been venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations for…