From Scotsman.com: In search of St Valentine.
Posted on February 14, 2005 01:42 AM. Filed under: religion.If ever there was a case of a man's sum being greater than his parts, it must be Saint Valentine; or is it more a case of the parts being all over the place? (...)
I’m standing in the atrium of the Blessed John Duns Scotus Church in Glasgow - self-styled "City of Love", for this week at least - and contemplating a wood and brass reliquary casket bearing the words Corpus St Valentini Martyris. The saint’s remains, or some of them, are interred here in the Gorbals, an area not widely associated with romance, having been transferred to the 1960s-built church in 1999, when the local Franciscan community moved from the older St Francis’s church round the corner. (...)
"He tends to be celebrated today through commercial interest rather than through any great devotion," observes Father Patrick Lonsdale, one of the handful of Franciscan friars based at Blessed John Duns Scotus. But which St Valentine are we talking about? For the lovers’ friend and postman’s bane remains a shadowy figure, as elusive as Harry Lime and, as any hagiography will tell you, there is more than one of him.
Father Patrick is affably vague about the relic or relics, and one gets the impression he regards the annual if fleeting celebrity status bestowed on the saint in the box as something of a distraction from his usual round of prayer, preaching and pastoral work. As we sift through documentation pertaining to the saint in his office, it emerges that nobody seems very clear as to which Valentine’s remains Glasgow can lay claim to, or indeed which particular bits of the man are housed in that reliquary.
Is he the same Valentine, for instance, whose mortal remains are also boasted by Whitefriar Street Church in Dublin, whose Carmelite community also lays claim to the saint, though not all of him? "I wouldn’t think so," replies Father Chris Crowley at Whitefriar Street when I ask him whether all of Valentine might be interred in the Dublin church. And there are, he tells me, further remains of the saint at Derrynane Abbey in Kerry, a place closely associated with the great battler for Irish Catholic emancipation, Daniel O’Connell. [continue]