Happy New Year – yes it is my first post on this blog in 2012. I have been active elsewhere though!
Also happy Valentine’s Day!
I was pleased this morning to read that Baroness Warsi is to see the Pope and agree with him about the marginalisation of faith, especially Christianity, in our society today. She might like to mention one minor contribution the Vatican has itself made to this.
St. Valentine is surely one of the Christian saints almost everybody has heard of and his feast day is known to just about everybody – especially the manufacturers of greetings cards, florists and restaurateurs. The Roman Martyrology (pre-Vatican 2) lists today as his birthday and says that ‘after many wondrous works of healing and teaching, he was scourged with rods and beheaded under Claudius Caesar.’ This makes him one of the earliest Christian martyrs. My 1962 Roman Missal lists today as ‘Commemoration of St. Valentine’ and researches into the Greek Orthodox calendar also list today as ‘Valentini’.
So why does the ‘Novus Ordo’, introduced by Archbp. Hannibal Bugnini under Pope Paul VI after Vatican 2 and called by Pope Benedict ‘the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite’ remove this best known of saints from the Calendar altogether?
Under the ‘Ordinary Form’ I should wish you all a happy feast of SS. Cyril and Methodius but it doesn’t quite have the same ring does it?
So come on Sayeeda, tell His Holiness to put St. Valentine back where he belongs and where he has been since Christianity’s earliest days!
PaulJ's bench.......... 