The story of St. Valentine is so hard to correctly nail down that the Catholic Church removed it from the list of feasts to be celebrated and took St. Valentine’s Day off the calendar in 1969. The best story seems to be that during Roman Emperor Claudius the Cruel’s reign around AD 270 the emperor was having trouble getting men into the army. He decided to ban all marriages and engagements thinking that men wanting to marry was keeping enlistment down. A Roman priest named Valentine refused to “stop the love” and married couples and would not cease despite the emperor’s edict so Claudius lived up to his nickname and had Valentine beheaded supposedly on February 14, 278.
