The True Story of Valentine’s Day

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Speaker 1: This is our American stories. Valentine’s Day began as a feast to celebrate the decapitation of a third century Christian martyr. So how did we get from a beheading to betrothing? Here’s Greg Hangler.00:00:27
Speaker 2: Today very little is known about the origins of Valentine’s Day, nor the holiday’s namesake. What we do know comes from an order of Belgian monks who spent three centuries collecting evidence for the lives of saints from manuscript archives around the world. They were called Bolandists after Jean Boland, a Jesuit scholar, who in sixteen forty three began publishing the massive sixty eight volumes titled The Lives of the Saints. Since then, success of general nations of monks continued the work until the last volume was published in nineteen forty. The monks dug up every scrap of information about every saint on the liturgical calendar and printed the text arranged according to the saint’s feast day. The volume encompassing February fourteenth contains the story of Saint Valentine. In the third century, the Roman Empire was being invaded by the Goths. At the same time, smallpox broke out, killing up to five thousand people a day, which greatly depleted the number of soldiers in the Roman army, by far the most powerful military in the world. Believing that men fought better if they were not married, the ambitious Emperor Claudius the Second banned marriage in the military. Also to quell internal rivalries over the previous emperor’s assassination, Claudius had the Senate deify him along with the Roman gods, and compelled citizens to worship him. Those who refused to worship the Roman gods were considered unpatriotic enemies of the state and were killed. Saint Valentine was a priest in central Italy. He risked the emperor’s wrath by secretly marrying Christian soldiers to their young brides. When Emperor Claudius got word that Valentine was performing these marriages and refused to deny his conscience and worship pagan idols, Valentine was arrested, brought to Rome, and sentenced to death. While awaiting execution, young couples that he had secretly wed would visit his cell, passing him notes and flowers between the bars as symbols of their gratitude. During this time, Valentine also shared the Gospel with his judge and jailer Asterius Here’s Corney Becker, dean of regent University.

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Speaker 3: Say to him, well, if this indeed is true, I want you to prove it. And he brought one of his adopted daughters, who happened to be blind. The one legend says, and what happened is that Valentines or Valentine him, led his hands upon this go and she was healed. Immediately.

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Speaker 2: Valentine and the judge’s daughter would fall in love, and on Valentine’s last night, he wrote a love letter to the jailer’s daughter, signing it from your Valentine. A tradition was born, and to this very day, lovers all over the world signed their Valentine’s Day cards with the same signature. Saint Valentine was beaten with clubs and stones, and when that failed to kill him, he was beheaded outside the Flaminian Gate on February fourteenth to sixty nine AD. Although Valentine’s Day is universally celebrated like Christmas, those who share the faith of Father Valentine find extra encouragement in this day that celebrates love. Here’s Father Dwight Longnecker and doctor Becker.

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Speaker 4: When we see those hearts on Valentine’s Day, we can remember that that heart is also had some connections back to the heart of Jesus and to God’s love for us. And we can remember that the source of all love, and the source of self sacrifice and love for each other is rooted in God’s love and in the witness that Saint Valentine actually made for that love.

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Speaker 3: For Christian’s marriage is a holy parable of the love of Christ towards his church. It’s a visible sermon about what holiness and purity could look like in our lives. We should celebrate what true sacrificial love looks like in a broken world. And ultimately, it should be a day that we celebrate the commitment of Christ who gets his life for his church. It should be a day where we celebrate the power of true love to change our world.

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Speaker 2: In four ninety six, a d Pope Gleasias designated February fourteenth as Saint Valentine’s Day. The love connections solidified more than a thousand years after the martyr’s death, when Jeffrey Chaucer, author of the Canterbury Tales to creed the February feast of Saint Valentine’s to the mating of birds. He wrote in his poem The Parliament of Fowls, for this was on Saint Valentine’s Day, when every bird comes there to choose his mate. Soon European nobility began sending love notes during the February bird mating season. Ophelia spoke of herself as Hamlet’s Valentine. In the following centuries, English men and women began using February fourteenth as an excuse to pen verses to their love objects. People often signed Valentine’s cards with xes and o’s. The Greek name for Christ begins with the letter X, so X became a common abbreviation for the name Christ. This is why Christmas is abbreviated as X mess. In medieval times, the X was called Christ’s cross, which we now call Chris cross. This cross was a form of a written oath, similar to the ancient practice of swearing upon a Bible, saying so help me God, and then kissing the Bible. People would sign a document with an X or place their signature next to the Christ’s cross to swear before Christ, they would keep the agreement and then kiss it to show their sincerity. This practice has come down to us as sign at the X or I swear cross my heart. This is the origin of signing Valentine’s cards and love letters with an X to express a pledge before Christ to be faithful in an O to seal the pledge with a kiss of sincerity, and like the holiday itself, this practice has been transformed into the secular stamp we now know as hugs and kisses. History is intertwined with Valentine’s references. Frederick Douglas was born a slave and separated from his mother as a child. All he remembers is her calling him my little Valentine. Theodore Roosevelt’s wife and mother both died on Valentine’s Day in eighteen eighty four, and the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre occurred in nineteen twenty nine during the Prohibition era. In the eighteen forties, Esther A. Howland began selling the first mass produced Valentine’s cards in America. Today, according to the Greeting Card Association and estimated one hundred and forty five million Valentine’s Day cards are sent each year in America one billion worldwide, making Valentine’s Day the second largest card sending holiday of the year. Christmas earns the gold medal and Mother’s Day gets the bronze. Women purchase approximately eighty five percent of all Valentine’s Day cards, but men spend double the amount of money on Valentine’s Day gifts than women. The average amount a man spends is one hundred and thirty dollars. Of all the flowers bought on Valentine’s Day, seventy three percent of the purchasers are men, and approximately fifteen percent of women send themselves flowers. On Valentine’s Day, more than thirty six million boxes of heart shaped chocolates are sold and more than two hundred and twenty million roses are produced for the holiday. In a typical year. Altogether, Americans spend almost twenty billion dollars on Valentine’s Day. While the most popular gifts are candy and flowers, nearly twenty percent of American splurge on jewelry, shelling out as much as four billion dollars annually, and those who prefer the ultimated romantic gesture are definitely not alone. A recent survey revealed that as many as six million couples are likely to get engaged on February fourteenth. But if you’re worried that you can’t afford to treat your loved one properly on Valentine’s Day, take heart. The poets were right. Love is really all you need. It seems that the saint behind the holiday of Love remains as elusive as love itself. Still, as Saint Augustine the Great fifth century theologian and philosopher argued in his Treaties on Faith and Invisible Things, someone does not have to be standing before our eyes for us to love them. And much like love itself, Saint Valentine and his reputation as the patron Saint of Love are not matters of verifiable history, but of faith. I’m Greg Hingler, and from all of us here at our American stories have a lovely Valentine’s Day.

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Speaker 1: And what a great story. And one need not be a person of faith to understand so much of this and the sacrificial nature of love, true love in a broken world. And by the way, what was interesting is that Saint Valentine didn’t want to take orders from the emperor and this country was founded on this notion that we don’t pray to our leaders, we pray for our leaders. The story of Saint Valentine and the story of Valentine’s Day. Here on our American Stories.