Forget about overpriced roses and heart-shaped chocolates. True aficionados of Valentine's Day were queuing to visit St Valentine at his shrine in Dublin's Whitefriar Street Church yesterday.
The casket is said to contain some of the remains, or relics, of St Valentine, the Italian priest who was martyred in AD269.
Fr Christopher Crowley of Whitefriar Street Church said that the shrine had attracted "a scattering of people" every day but the numbers increased greatly throughout the month of February.
"We get a very substantial number of couples," he said. "I think it's bigger this year than other years. Is it indicative of anything? Not particularly, I would say, but it's hard to gauge."
He estimated that more than 2,000 people visited the shrine in the past two days. Yesterday, there was a continuous stream of people queuing to write their prayer requests in a number of books laid out for the occasion.
One of St Valentine's most devoted fans must surely be Kathryn Cahille, who has been coming to the church on St Valentine's Day for the past 30 years.
"I really look forward to it," she said. "I have a little shrine to him that I put up every year. I have hearts and flowers on the door and a picture of St Valentine which I got here in this church."
Also included among the visitors were Richard and Tamsin Nihill from York in England. Richard had brought Tamsin to Dublin for a romantic break before realising that it was home to the shrine.
"We just had to visit, because of the day," he said, holding his wife's hand.
The casket is brought from the shrine to the front of the altar for the days around St Valentine's Day and tourists took turns to be photographed with it yesterday before the 11am and 3pm Masses which were dedicated to the saint.
Fr Crowley said that the casket had been sealed by the Holy See and would never be opened because that would destroy its authenticity. It contains some of the saint's bones, a small vessel tinged with his blood and letters of authentication from the Vatican.
While there are many different stories about St Valentine, Fr Crowley said there was no question about how the relics came to Ireland.
An Irish Carmelite, Dr John Spratt, had an audience with Pope Gregory XVI in 1835 and he so impressed the pope with his preaching skills that he was presented with the relics which had been recently exhumed.
The casket arrived in Dublin on November 10th, 1836, and was brought in solemn procession from the docks to Whitefriar Street. Relics of St Valentine are also said to be contained in caskets in France, Vienna and Glasgow.
But for all his popularity, St Valentine's shrine is not the busiest at the church.
"No, that would be St Jude," Fr Crowley said. "St Jude, get me a man," used to be the single woman's mantra to the patron saint of hopeless cases, Fr Crowley recalled.
So it all comes back to romance in the end.
