When the saints come marching in
Only the most heartless need reminding to make a gesture to their loved one today — even if it is only a kiss. But how many of the millions who celebrate Valentine’s Day have any idea about the saint for whom it is named? For that matter, who cares about saints at all nowadays?
In Rome, at least, they still do. Pope Francis has just approved the canonisation of the Blessed John Henry Newman, the first English saint of modern times. Newman was not only the most celebrated of all Catholic converts from Anglicanism, but one of the greatest Christian theologians and preachers who ever lived. Yet the recognition of his sainthood depended on miraculous proof of his intercession with God, after two separate cases of prayers to the saint by the incurably sick were answered.
More is known about Newman than almost any other Victorian eminence, thanks to his voluminous correspondence and his immortal spiritual autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita Sua. St Valentinus, the saint whose feast the Church (and by implication the rest of us) marks today, is much more obscure. He may indeed be a conflation of three different early Christians, all martyred in Roman persecutions under the Emperor Claudius. Little is certain about any of these shadowy figures, but hagiographies established the legends that have led to our Valentine traditions.
Valentinus is said to have restored the sight of a blind girl, the daughter of Judge Asterius, who was converted by this miracle. The saint was later arrested for this and other acts of evangelism. According to a later embellishment of the legend, before his execution he sent a letter to the girl, signed “from your Valentinus”. Though this was no love letter, but presumably intended to fortify the recipient in her faith, it gave rise to the practice of sending Valentines on the saint’s day.
Another legend suggests that Valentinus married young couples secretly in order to help the husbands evade conscription, as only unmarried men served in the Roman army. This story might have given rise to romantic associations, but it would also make Valentinus the patron saint of draft-dodgers, as well as the beekeepers, epileptics and, of course, couples who traditionally look to him for intercession and spiritual comfort.
Saints once loomed much larger in our national consciousness, thanks to the medieval calendar that marked out the year and the countless foundations of churches and shrines, cathedrals and abbeys, hospitals and charities, all of which nourished body and soul.
By the time the Reformation began an often violent and iconoclastic reaction against saints and all that they stood for, the English boasted two of the most popular pilgrimage destinations in Europe, Canterbury and Walsingham, where shrines to St Thomas Becket and Our Lady respectively inspired countless unrecorded spiritual journeys, as well as the first masterpiece of English literature, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
Our modern nation states simply would not exist but for incredible deeds of devotion during the so-called Dark Ages. Missionary saints such as the Irish St Columba and the Roman St Augustine of Canterbury began the conversion of Scotland and England respectively, while the Englishman St Boniface did the same for the Germans.
The European Union may not care to celebrate its Judaeo-Christian origins and heritage, but it remains a fact that Europe as we know it only emerged from the ruins of the pagan world thanks to Christian leaders — and it is no accident that so many of them were saints. Scholars such as St Augustine of Hippo and St Bede of Jarrow, popes such as St Leo the Great and St Gregory the Great, monks such as St Benedict and St Bernard, friars such as St Francis and St Dominic, nuns such as St Hildegard of Bingen and St Theresa of Avila — all these saints and hundreds more have made an incomparable contribution to Western civilisation.
And the march of the saints continues to this day. St John Paul II did more than anybody else to bring an end to communist tyranny and the Cold War. Mother Teresa, now known officially as St Teresa of Calcutta, did more to alleviate and raise awareness of poverty in the developing world than any other individual.
So as you enjoy dining with your Valentine, having delighted in giving or receiving Valentine’s Day cards and flowers, spare a thought for the saints without whose ghostly presence and colossal achievements our world would be so much poorer.
