saint valentine

Whitefriar Street Church in Dublin is home to the relics of Saint Valentine. A shrine of St. Valentine is at Carmelite Church on Whitefriar Street in Dublin.

In ancient Rome, the date February 14th was a holiday to honor the Roman Goddess of women and marriage. The next day was celebrated as the pagan Roman Feast of Lupercalia. During this time in Roman history, young adults were strictly segregated by sex. No surprise, it was 269 AD. Eventually, they needed to give their hormones a chance to flourish. So it was customary on the eve of the feast of Lupercalia for young men and women to be partnered for the feast by the men picking the girls' names from a jar. Sometimes the pairing lasted for a year and the young couples fall romantically in love and eventually marring. It was all very sexist in a provocative way.

Unfortunately, this didn't last for long. This euphoric ritual of hormonal teenage partnering would come to an abrupt end during the tyrannical rule of Emperor Claudius II, also known as Claudius the cruel. Emperor Claudius had Rome fighting in many bloody and unpopular battles and was having grave difficulty recruiting soldiers