Saint Valentine's Day true meaning

  HH Radhanath Swami Maharaj explains the Real meaning of Valentine's day

When I was young, no one called it Valentines Day, everyone called it Saint Valentines day. You remember? Now they just call it Valentines Day because they don’t want to think about saints (laughter). Because its actually totally contradictory to the whole conception of what valentine’s day is all about. Who was saint valentine?
There were 2 saint valentines. And they were both celibate monks how were preachers of God consciousness. One of them was a catholic priest who lived in Rome and who preached the message of love of God with such enthusiasm and there was so much opposition against him, he lived in the second half of the 3rd century; that means just two and a half hundred years after Jesus Christ. And even though preaching of Christianity was against the law, it was a criminal activity, he was preaching, he was risking his life and he was brahmachari. He was a priest, he sacrificed family life, any relationship with sex, for the sake of preaching the instructions of love of God and he was captured, he was tortured and he was killed. He’s one of the great martyrs of the Catholic Church.
And then the second saint vcalentie, he was a bishop in the catholic church. He was also a celibate monk, who dedicated his whole life to God conciosness, and he was a preacher, and he was also catured tortured and killed because he wouldn’t give up preaching devotion to God. Saint valentine, these 2 great personalities, they sacrificed all the pleasures of this world, life itself to serve God.
So you may be wondering, what that has to do with Valendites day in Bombay today. I don’t see any celibate is giving valentines, at least they are not supposed to. But saint valentine was celibate. He respected every woman as his mother. Because the day both these saint Valentines were killed, were murdered, was February 14th. February 14th is the middle of the second month of the year. It’s like the beginning of spring. Yes?
People saw male and female birds meeting in the trees and mating. It’s the mating season. The inauguration of the mating season for the birds and the beasts .Romantic materialists are very attracted to this when they see a male bird and a female bird biting each other with their beaks and having sex life. So since the middle of Feb. is the day when the birds mate, they were thinking that we should consecrate this day as the day of showing your passionate love to others because that’s what the birds do on this day, And it happened to be the day on which saint valentine was murdered, so it came to be known as saint valentines day. Hare Krishna. So really what saint valentines day is all about for a religious person is giving up everything, being willing to undergo torture and killing in the service of the lord. But to a materialistic person Saint Valentine’s Day means following in the footsteps of the lusty birds.

Hare Krsna