Valentine

Panati's Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things, published by Harper & Row, New York, 1987 says, although the mid-February holiday celebrating love remains wildly popular, the confusion over its origins led the Catholic Church in 1969 to drop St. Valentine Day from the Roman calendar of official, worldwide Catholic feasts.

In Rome in AD 270, Bishop Valentine had enraged Emperor Claudius II, who had issued an edict forbidding marriage. Claudius felt that married men made poor soldiers, because they were loath to leave their families for battle.

The empire needed soldiers, so Claudius, never one to fear unpopularity, abolished marriage.
St. Valentine, then bishop of Interamna, invited young lovers to come to him in secret, where he joined them in the sacrament of matrimony.

Claudius, who learned of this "friend of lovers," had Bishop Valentine brought to the palace.
The emperor, impressed with the young priest's dignity and conviction, attempted to convert him to the Roman gods, to save him from otherwise certain execution. However, Bishop Valentine refused to renounce Christianity and imprudently attempted to convert the emperor. On February 24, 270, Valentine was clubbed, stoned, then beheaded.

From the Church's standpoint, Valentine seemed to be the ideal candidate to usurp the popularity of Lupercus, so in AD 496, a stern Pope Gelasius outlawed the mid-February Lupercian festival but retained the lottery, aware of Romans' love for games of chance. In the box that had once held the names of available and willing single women, were placed the names of saints.

Both men and women extracted slips of paper, and in the ensuing year they were expected to emulate the life of the saint whose name they had drawn. Admittedly, it was a different game, with different incentives.

To expect a woman but draw a saint must have disappointed many a Roman male. The spiritual overseer of the entire affair was its patron saint, Valentine.With reluctance, and the passage of time, more and more Romans relinquished their pagan festival and replaced it with the Church's holy day.

Traditionally, mid-February was a Roman time to meet and court prospective mates in accordance with the Lupercian lottery under the penalty of mortal sin.

Roman young men did institute the custom of offering women they admired and wished to court handwritten greetings of affection on February 14. The cards acquired St. Valentine's name. In the sixteenth century Bishop of Geneva, St Francis de Sales attempted to expunge the custom of cards and reinstate the lottery of saints' names.

He felt that Christians had become wayward and needed models to emulate. However, this lottery was less successful and shorter-lived than Pope Gelasius.

The valentine cards proliferated and became more decorative. Cupid, the naked cherub armed with arrows dipped in love potion, became a popular valentine image.

In 1797, a British publisher issued "The Young Man's Valentine Writer," which contained scores of suggested sentimental verses for the young lovers unable to compose on their own.

Printers had already begun producing a limited number of cards with verses and sketches, called "mechanical valentines," and a reduction in postal rates in the next century ushered in the less personal but easier practice of mailing valentines.

That made it possible for the first time to exchange cards anonymously, which is taken as the reason for the sudden appearance of racy verse in an era otherwise prudish.

The burgeoning number of obscene valentine cards caused several countries to ban the practice of exchanging cards. In Chicago, for instance, late in the nineteenth century, the post office rejected some 25,000 cards on the grounds that they were not fit to be carried through the United States mail.

This info from Ghana,
of all places!