fr. amore and valentine's day

What I am about to tell you is an inside story why February 14 is no longer the feast of St. Valentine and is replaced by the feast of Sts. Cyril and Methodius. Why was Valentine’s day, meaning the day of St. Valentine replaced with the day of Sts. Cyril and Methodius?
It began with the priest named Fr. Amore. Fr. Amore was an archaeologist and one of his studies centred on the ancient tomb stones in the catacombs or the so called underground cemeteries of Rome. One of the tombstones that he studied was that of St. Valentinus. On the tombstone of the saint was written the name Valentinus, but alas Fr. Amore discovered that the tombstone or the lapida was actually made up of two broken tombstones glued together, and the marble on one part is different from the marble of the other part. On one part was written Vale which in Latin actually means goodbye, a word that is commonly written on the tombstones of the Romans. The other part contains the letters NTINUS, which can be the last two syllables of so many Roman names like Clementinus, Quintinus, Cotentinus, including Valentinus himself. And so, when the Calendar of the saints were rearranged in the late 1960’s and early 70’s, saints of doubtful origin or saints with stories steeped with so many elements considered legendary where expunged from the list. It is not to say however that they are fake. It only means that the stories about them which reached us today are more legendary rather than stories using factual elements. And besides there are at the very least three Valentinus who were martyred and no one know who of the three is referred to by the feast. That is why February 14 now is no longer the feast of St. Valentine but of Cyril and Methodius.


When the fans and supporters of St. Valentine protested the exclusion of the saint from the calendar they pointed out that the archaeologist, Fr. Amore wanted to expunge Valentinus from the list of the saints because Valentines is associated with love and Fr. Amore merely wanted to replace him. After all, his name is Amore, meaning love. Fr. Amore was just envious of Valentinus.
The symbol of Valentine’s day is the heart. It does not refer to the anatomical heart or the heart found on our chests but to our very being. When I say I love you with all my heart it means I love you with all my being. The association comes from the bible itself. In the Old Testament it is mentioned 550 times and in the New Testament the heart is mentioned more than 50 times. The heart is the symbol of who we are, our character, our being, our deepest self. Thus we use this metaphor to describe the person. A person who does not have compassion is heartless. A brave person is stout-hearted while a person who is cowardly is faint-hearted. When we are sad our hearts are described as broken but when we are happy our hearts burst with joy. In the bible a prophet prophesied that God would one day replace our stony hearts and give us natural hearts. Mary’s heart was pierced with a sword and all that happened in her life she kept in her heart.
The heart is the symbol of our being and love is just one possibility of that being. As Jesus noted in our gospel today, a person can also be hard hearted, a person can have a hardened heart. What does that mean? In the context of our gospel today a person with hardened heart is a person who cannot understand and a person who cannot understand is a person who cannot connect the dots. They were worried about having no bread, having nothing to eat when they have jsut experienced how it was when Jesus multiplied the bread and the fish. And still they are worried. Barclay in his commentary said that most often we learn only half from our experiences which he says makes us pessimistic. We go through a crisis in our lives and we come out of it remembering only how that crisis brought us so much pain and so much suffering and so much deprivation. We seldom remember how we survived it and the fact that we survived it. “Too often experience fills us with pessimism, teaches us what we cannot do, teaches us to view life with a kind of resigned hopelessness. But there is this other side of our experiences which we forget. Sorrow came--and we came through it still erect. Temptation came--and somehow we did not fall. Illness took us--and somehow we recovered. A problem seemed insoluble--and somehow it was solved. We were at our wits' end--and somehow we went on. We reached the breaking point--and somehow we did not break.”
We are hard hearted, our hearts are hardened like the disciples when we could not remember these facts in our experiences, when we fail to connect the dots in our lives and see how Jesus was there aiding us all throughout this journey of ours.
Today in this day of hearts let us examine the kind of heart that we got. The heart is not just about love. The heart as the bible says is the symbol of our being, the heart defines us. St. Valentine might be more legend than fact, but in matters of the heart we look to Jesus in his Sacred Heart and we learn a great deal from him as to the kind of heart we must have, as to the kind of person God wants us to become.