Today is Valentine’s Day,also called Saint Valentine’s Day.
It is celebrated every February 14 when lovers express their affection with greetings and gifts.
Given their similarities, it has been suggested that the holiday has origins in the Roman festival of Lupercalia, held in mid-February.
The festival, which celebrated the coming of spring, included fertility rites and the pairing off of women with men by lottery.
At the end of the fifth century, Pope Gelasius the first, forbid the celebration of Lupercalia and is sometimes attributed with replacing it with Saint Valentine’s Day. s
Valentine’s Day did not come to be celebrated as a day of romance until about the fourteenth century.
Although there were several Christian martyrs named Valentine, the day may have taken its name from a priest who was martyred about two hundred and seventy Common Era by the emperor Claudius II Gothicus.
According to legend, the priest signed a letter from Valentine to his jailer’s daughter, whom he had befriended and, by some accounts, healed from blindness.
Other accounts hold that it was Saint Valentine of Terni, a bishop, for whom the holiday was named, though it is possible the two saints were actually one person. Another common legend states that SaintValentine defied the emperor’s orders and secretly married couples to spare the husbands from war.
It is for this reason that his feast day is associated with love.
Speaking on the significance of the day, a Catholic Priest, Reverend Father Chika Okpalaike, charged youths not to deviate from the true meaning of feast of Saint Valentine, rather to see it as a day to show agape love to people, especially the vulnerable.
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