Saint Valentine

Saint Valentine was a martyr whom the Church in Rome has venerated since antiquity. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on February 14 in a single sentence: at Rome, on the Via Flaminia near the Milvian Bridge, Saint Valentine, martyr. Apart from his name, the day of his memorial, and the place of his burial, almost nothing is known about him for certain.

We do not know the year of his birth or of his death. The surest evidence remains his tomb on the Via Flaminia, at the foot of the Parioli hill in Rome, where the catacomb bearing his name, which goes back to the third century, still exists. In the fourth century Pope Julius I built a basilica over the martyr’s tomb, and in the seventh century Popes Honorius I and Theodore I restored it. Pilgrim guides from that same century mention it.

The accounts of his life were written down only several centuries later, and historians do not consider them reliable. They preserved two traditions. According to the first, Valentine was a Roman priest who, under Emperor Claudius II Gothicus in the second half of the third century, restored the sight of the daughter of a dignitary named Asterius, brought his whole household to baptism, and was beheaded on the Via Flaminia. According to the second, he was bishop of Terni in Umbria: called to Rome, he healed the son of the rhetorician Crato and baptized his family, after which he was beheaded at night by order of the prefect Placidus, and his disciples carried his body to Terni.

The former Martyrology listed both on this day: the priest of Rome and the bishop of Terni. The same day, the same place of execution, and the similar course of the two accounts lead many scholars to see in them a single martyr, venerated in two cities. The present Martyrology has one entry and calls him simply a martyr. In Terni he is venerated as bishop and patron of the city, and his basilica stands where, according to tradition, he was buried.

He became the patron of lovers and engaged couples only in the late Middle Ages. In England and France it was believed that birds pair off in mid-February; the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer mentions this in the fourteenth century, and from then on Saint Valentine’s Day was regarded as a feast of lovers. The stories that the saint secretly blessed marriages are later still and have no support in the old accounts. In German lands he was also invoked in serious illnesses, especially epilepsy.

When the liturgical calendar was revised in 1969, his memorial, though very ancient, was left to local calendars precisely because so little is known about him. Valentine nevertheless remained in the Roman Martyrology. In the exhortation “Amoris Laetitia,” Pope Francis recalled Saint Valentine’s Day as an occasion that in some countries merchants put to better use than pastors do. The saint was not canonized in today’s sense: like other martyrs of the first centuries, he has been venerated since antiquity.