Be My Valentine

Happy St. Valentine’s Day, and Sts. Cyril and Methodius day, the poor Eastern European evangelists who get overlooked in the secular world in favor of a lesser-known 3rd C martyr. There’s not much recorded about the life of St. Valentine, other than that he was a Roman martyr. Supposedly, he would marry Christian couples clandestinely so that the husbands would avoid military service, something the pagan Emperors would force upon the married Christian men to limit or deter Christian population growth. This is one of the reasons why this day is connected to romance. The tragedy of our day is that romantic love has been severed from marital love. Marital love is not just emotional. It enjoys objective qualities rooted in the very inner life of God. Christian marriage vows contain these principles of Divine Love: that it’s offered freely, faithfully, permanently, with the goal of fruitfulness with children.

Romantic love is an emotional attachment between two persons, and in our culture, usually entails activity that is supposed to be kept within marriage. This is not to say that it is not affiliated with marital love, its to say that its different and more subjective. Marital love seeks to sacrifice for the good of one’s spouse and family. Children are the natural result of this kind of love. Romantic love seeks to receive the pleasurable feelings that come with attachment to the other. It is therefore less important and lacks the divine dimension intended within marital love. St. Valentine, by sacrificing himself to proclaim the Gospel of Life, shows us the deeper and sacrificial dimension of Matrimony. St. Paul teaches in his letter to the Ephesians that Christ’s sacrifice transformed spousal love into a Sacrament, making each spouse a means of sanctification for the other (cf. Ephesians 5).  This is what it really means to ‘Be My Valentine,’ to be a witness (martyr means witness) to love!