Did you know that Valentine’s Day, although a widely secularized holiday, originated as a Catholic feast day?
Saint Valentine was a bishop in the third century who was martyred for his Catholic faith. One legend has it that he married couples in secret, hence the connection of his feast day (February 14th) to romance and love.
How can we, as Catholics, make the celebration of this feast day more Christian?
Turn your thoughts to the Hearts of Jesus and Mary. The Sacred Heart of Jesus is the source of all Love which flows to us through the Immaculate Heart of His Mother. Isn’t love what everyone’s heart longs for? The only love that can satisfy us is the Love of the Sacred Heart. Saint Augustine said, “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and restless is our heart until it comes to rest in You.”
Perhaps Valentine’s Day (which happens to fall on a Friday this year) is a good time to have an image of the Sacred Heart enthroned in your home. This is a very simple ceremony which the father of the house can do, involving hymns to Christ the King and an act of Consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The day of the enthronement is preceded by a triduum (three days) of preparing for the ceremony with prayers, hymns, and Scripture readings. You can find the Enthronement prayers here.
The easiest way to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is through the Immaculate Heart of His Mother.
In the words of the Daily Prayer of Those Consecrated to Our Lady of Guadalupe, composed by His Eminence, Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke, let us pray to our Lady, “May my heart, one with your sorrowful and immaculate Heart, rest ever more perfectly in His glorious pierced Heart. In all things may I do what He is asking of me. In difficulties, trials and temptations, may I, in the embrace of your arms, trust His promise to win in me the victory over sin and death.”
As we prepare to enter more deeply into the spiritual battle with the beginning of Lent, we find our strength in the Love of the Sacred Heart of Jesus - a love that filled Saint Valentine to the point of his being martyred for his faith, his love of the Sacred Heart.
Saint Valentine, pray for us!
