DUBLIN, Ireland -- A quiet Carmelite priory off a bustling Dublin street holds a special place in Irish hearts, for here lie the revered remains of St. Valentine.
At least, that's what the splintering 163-year-old parchment from Pope Gregory XVI says -- although it turns out that the Roman Catholic Church may have left St. Valentine's heart in Scotland and reserved other martyred body parts for his Italian hometown.Still, that doesn't dissuade romantic Dubliners from claiming Valentine as theirs and theirs alone.
"St. Valentine gave his life in defense of pure love. He's an inspirational figure," says Miceal Browne, kneeling at dusk inside Whitefriars Street Catholic Church beside his wife of 24 years, Aoife.
Like hundreds of other couples, the Brownes make pilgrimages to the church on their wedding anniversary in appreciation of St. Valentine, whose remains lie in a sealed steel casket within the chapel's white marble altar.
They plan to book a spot on the church's long waiting list to formally renew their vows in 2000.
Couples in Glasgow, Scotland, and Terni, Italy, make similar pilgrimages to rival resting places for Valentine, one of Christianity's earliest saints, whose promotion of marriage cost him his life.
Claudius Caesar II ordered Valentine imprisoned because he oversaw the marriages of Roman soldiers in violation of Rome's edict that its soldiers remain single, on the grounds it made them better fighters.
Valentine was sentenced to die in 269 A.D. by a judge named Asterius. The future saint cured Asterius' daughter of blindness and wrote her a final letter the night before he was beheaded. He inspired today's romantic missives by signing it, "From your Valentine."
The Benedictine priests of the Blessed John Duns Scotus Church in Glasgow insist the Vatican gave them the remains of the saint's heart in 1868.
"Often times, the church has seen fit to break up the remains of a saint to provide relics of veneration," explains the Rev. Peter Hall of the Scottish church.
"It would be good to set the record straight about -- not to be too crude about it -- but about whose bits are where," he adds.
The parish priest in Dublin, the Rev. Frank O'Gara, admits he's irritated by the rival claims. He points with determination to the January 1836 letter from Pope Gregory XVI that accompanied a wooden box from Rome.
The letter says that, in recognition of the good work of Irish Carmelites, the remains of St. Valentine had been exhumed from a Roman cemetery and put into the box, "well closed, tied with a red silk ribbon and sealed."
"None of the other churches have such definitive proof," O'Gara says. "To be told that the tomb of St. Valentine in our church is somehow inauthentic or incomplete is annoying."
Miceal Browne says on Valentine's Day, it should be just the thought that counts.
"As a Catholic," he says, "you've just got to have faith and not ask too many questions."