St Valentine, Priest & Martyr

As February 14 rolls round once again, everyone knows immediately that it is the feast day of. . . .Ss. Cyril and Methodius. Oh, yes it is. It's right there in your 2004 liturgical calendar. In a move that one would think even such an unimaginative bureaucrat as Annibale Bugnini would have had second thoughts about, the liturgical tinkerers removed one of the only two saints days that the average American could recognize. St. Valentine has vanished from the new calendar.

I first said that in 2004. Poor St Valentine is still MIA in the Pauline Rite.

If you visit the link, there's more there than my complaint. There's also a little of St Valentine's legenda taken from The Anglican Breviary.


Oh, and the other saint's day that every American knows is St Patrick's Day. Attenuated and deformed as the American observance is, they were - are - still reminders of the old faith that underlies everything good in the west.

And so long as we're on forgotten saints, today is also the old commemoration of St Conran. He was an early bishop of the Orkneys. No one seems to know much of anything else about him. Talk about forgotten. Fr Butler has a whole paragraph here but it's only nominally about St Conran.