Happy Feast of St. Valentine’s Day

On this day in 1969, Paul VI slapped Roman and Eastern Catholics in the face with his motu proprio Mysterii Paschalis. With all of the wisdom and foresight of a bureaucrat, Paul VI explained why the “suppression of reference to a certain number of saints who are not universally known” is required as part of the Second Vatican Council’s cleanup and restoration of Holy Mother Church.

Some unfortunate victims, such as St. Valentine, are not, it turns out, universally significant, despite their place in the collective Catholic memory and even in the wider culture (although stripped of religious significance).  

The great irony of this tone-deaf declaration is that St. Valentine, in fact, possesses such universal significance that in spite of the Council’s diktat, celebration of his former feast day persists in America and in many European countries, both among Christians and non-Christians. And this is the great disservice that was done to Sts. Cyril and Methodius, whose feast day was moved from July 5 to February 14. Thus, they are practically forgotten amid the celebrations of St. Valentine. 

Sadly, rather than try to maintain a beachhead in the culture through this festive day, the Conciliar Church decided simply to erase the feast altogether. Now, we Catholics can’t even point out that behind those saccharine Hallmark cards is actually the meaningful commemoration of a priest martyred for Christ.

The revolutionary document Sacrosanctum Concilium, one of the constitutions of the Second Vatican Council that changed the liturgy, states in its revision of the Divine Office that “the accounts of martyrdom or the lives of the saints are to accord with the facts of history.” This instruction no doubt played into the rather garbled logic to remove certain saints from the general calendar of feasts. Paul VI declared that the removal of saints who are “not universally known” can make way for “names of some martyrs of regions where the proclaiming of the Gospel arrived at a later date,” so that these “representatives of their countries” may also be recognized in the calendar. In other words, saints who were not universally known were to be replaced by other saints who were not universally known. But this would allow the Roman calendar to be “more diverse.”

St. Valentine did not meet the DEI criteria or the historical-critical requirement. 

What is known about St. Valentine is that he was martyred because he refused to renounce his faith in Christ, probably under the emperor Claudius. The legend surrounding him is that he was killed while celebrating the marriage of a Christian couple, which explains his connection in the popular imagination with romantic love. For Christians, though, there are multiple layers—St. Valentine so loved Christ that he died for him rather than renounce his faith; he loved his fellow Christians so much that he was willing to perform a marriage illegally; and he saw the immense value of love between a man and a woman united. Then there is the couple in the legend, who is a witness to the beauty of the sacrament of holy matrimony and their willingness to risk their lives for it.

What if the legends that surround Valentine’s life, rather than detracting from the truth, bring us closer to it? Just because something is rational or seems to hold up to the scientific method does not mean that it is truthful or conducive of virtue.  What if the legends that surround Valentine’s life, rather than detracting from the truth, bring us closer to it? Just because something is rational or seems to hold up to the scientific method does not mean that it is truthful or conducive of virtue.Tweet This

Tim O’Brien writes in the chapter “How to Tell a True War Story” in The Things They Carried (1990), “there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.” He was talking about the death of a friend during war, but could this not also be applied with equal truth to the martyrdom of a saint? O’Brien recalls someone trying to tell a story about the war but being unable to convey the reality. “I could tell how desperately Sanders wanted me to believe him,” O’Brien writes, “his frustration at not quite getting the details right, not quite pinning down the final and definitive truth.” Imagine if the dead man’s story could be told officially only if it accorded strictly with the facts of history. It would be a preposterous requirement, for who is the final arbiter?

St. Valentine may not have been killed during a wedding ceremony, or maybe he was; but in the mind of posterity, he was killed that way. It was because he married Christian couples that he was killed, therefore they killed him during the wedding. If that truth is not final and definitive enough for the Vatican, then it is because the Vatican lacks the imagination to see it.

For the abstract rationalist, not only must historical practices seem to accord with what is possible in the natural but they must also reflect a sort of natural simplicity and neatness. Jean-Jacques Rousseau complained that the proliferation of the arts and sciences (to say nothing of religion and social customs) only led us astray from our fundamental nature. We must return to the time in our history before all of the accumulations of history corrupted our pure natures, Rousseau argued. 

Similarly, Paul VI and the leaders of the Council were of the paradoxical romantic-rationalist view that the “multiplication of feasts, vigils and octaves” and the “complication of different parts of the liturgical year” draw us away from the Faith. All of this confusing clutter—formerly known as tradition—has “diverted” the minds of believers “from the fundamental mysteries of our Redemption.” There is a clear and distinct idea—the Redemption—that must be the focal point, and all of these vigils and traditions and lace and whatnot distract us from that, this line of thinking goes (up to the present). 

However, Catholics are not “fundamentalists.” The multiplicity of traditions, feasts, octaves, local devotions, and other liturgical aspects of Catholic life are not distractions from the central mystery of our faith but are the ways that we finite creatures understand and participate in the divine reality. It may seem messy to the rationalist, who longs for clear and definitive logic, or superstitious to the romantic, who desires a naturalistic “simplicity,” but Christ was not a Cartesian or a Rousseauist. 

Nowhere does Christ point to any “fundamental” ideas. He speaks in parables and illustrates through His life and actions—all of which suggest the ineffable and inexhaustible reality of truth that must be lived. 

Christians live in Christ (is there anything that defies fundamentalism more than this complex idea itself?) in ways that are concrete, textured, vivid, visceral, and memorable—feasting and fasting are memorable, as are the markers of the whole liturgical year (and the old liturgy itself). So are legends. Stories of the saints, whether or not they seem reasonable to experts in the historical-critical method, engage the imagination and draw us upward toward a life of holiness and moral heroism. 

So, happy former feast day of St. Valentine. I know I’ll be celebrating him.