St. Valentine

Valentine's Day, though it is a disingenuous, manufactured, Hallmark Holiday, can still be fun to celebrate when there is a more unusual way to mark it than chocolate and roses. This year, I found that I could celebrate Valentine's Day in Dublin in a way that you can't celebrate it anywhere else: with a trip to see St. Valentine himself.

The story goes that Father John Spratt, a Carmelite friar, journeyed from Dublin to Rome in 1835, and so impressed the Pope, Gregory XVI, that il Papa decided to present him with the remains of St. Valentine to take back to his home church. The truth of this trip is attested in the letter, displayed in a bronze tablet in the church, written by Gregory. Since December of 1835, then, the Whitefriar Street Church has had a shrine to the martyred patron saint of lovers, and a box of his remains and a vial of his blood.

This Saturday Valentine's Day, we arrived on Aungier St before mass was finished, so the church was quite crowded. When the service ended, we joined the line (I'm sorry, the queue) forming on the aisle nearest the saint's shrine. Here is a picture of the shrine:


It was pretty special, actually, to see all the people asking the saint for luck and love on the most romantic day of the year. There was a book underneath the statue of the saint in which the visitors wrote prayers or intercessions or requests. I read a few of them when it was my turn, and people were expressing their love for each other, for their families, even for the city of Dublin itself. There were thanks and requests, and when people were done writing, they turned around and lit a candle in front of the shrine. You can see a few of them in the picture, but it doesn't really give an impression of the light and shimering heat of the hundreds of candles.

After this visit to the shrine, the queue snaked around to the front of the church, where the box containing the saint's remains sat on a table. As people walked past it, they touched it, a motion very familiar to me, after leading people into St. Peter's every day last summer. It was a really unique and special way to mark Valentine's Day, and Hallmark had nothing to do with it...