This year, Valentine’s Day falls on Ash Wednesday — the beginning of Lent, which commemorates Jesus’s 40 days of prayer and fasting in the Judaean Desert and sees many Christians mark their foreheads with an ash cross to symbolize repentance and the dust from which God made man.

So, it is a good year to remember that Valentine’s Day was not always a so-called ‘Hallmark Holiday’ — a secular, commercial event leveraged for the betterment of multinational corporations. It is, in truth, a Christian holiday commemorating the martyrdom of Saint Valentine – a Roman clergyman who lived in the third century when Christians were still actively persecuted by the Roman Empire.

Saint Valentine’s connection to lovers is very real, although he is also the patron saint of beekeepers and epileptics. He was martyred for offering the sacrament of marriage to couples in secret.

The Roman emperor Claudius II opposed young men marrying because only single men could be drafted into the legions and/or because he believed men unencumbered by family ties made for better soldiers. (The details, unsurprisingly, are slightly murky.)

Saint Valentine, however, would perform the ceremonies in secret. According to tradition, he would gift them little hearts cut out of parchment to remember their vows. Inevitably, he fell under the eyes of the Roman authorities and was arrested.

KEEPING THE FAITH. 

Saint Valentine earned a reprieve when the judge overseeing his case, Asterius, brought his blind daughter, Julia, to him, asking if he could cure her. The saint prayed for the girl’s sight to be restored, and his prayers were answered. She and Asterius were baptized as Christians, and the saint was freed. But his freedom did not last.

Continuing his work, he was brought before Emperor Claudius the next time he was arrested. Claudius demanded the saint renounce his faith. Valentine refused and was sentenced to be beaten with clubs and stones, and finally decapitated on February 14th, 269 A.D.

Before he died, Saint Valentine wrote a letter to Julia, with whom he may have fallen in love, signing it “from your Valentine,” giving us the modern tradition.

St. Valentine’s Day, then, is truly about lovers and love — but sacramental and sacrificial love worth laying down one’s life for.