Who Was St. Valentine?
By Benito Cereno/Feb. 2, 2021 10:50 am EDT
In much of the world, the day most associated with romantic love is February 14, the Feast of Saint Valentine or, as it is more commonly known, Valentine s Day. We celebrate it by wearing red, eating chalky hearts with pseudo-romantic messages on them, and begrudgingly handing out cheap pieces of card stock with Transformers on them to every kid in the class. But how did we get here? Who is the Saint Valentine that we remember (kind of) each year by putting unnecessary pressure on ourselves to be romantic?
Well, no one really knows. As the Catholic Encyclopedia explains, the name Saint Valentine could refer to any one of three different martyrs who died on February 14 about whom very little else is known. The first Saint Valentine was a priest in Rome, and the second was a bishop elsewhere in Italy, and these two allegedly different people both lived in the latter half of the third century and were both buried on