Happy St. Valentine’s Day!
Candy hearts, valentine cards, chocolates, flowers. All Valentine’s Day images. The roots of St. Valentine’s day, however, are a little darker, shall we say?
According to The American Catholic website, St. Valentine himself, for whom the holiday is names, has a sketchy background, hard to pin down. He may have been a priest who helped persecuted Christians and was beheaded, or a bishop who was beheaded, or a priest who married couples illegally when marriage was forbidden and beheaded. Not even the Catholic Church is able to confirm which of these individuals actually was St. Valentine.
However, his name is associated with love for a very good reason.
For 800 years the ancient Romans had celebrated the Festival of Lupercalia, honoring the god Lupercus. On February 15, young Roman men would draw the name of a young woman who would then become his sexual companion for…
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