Skip to main content

The Patron Saint of the Desperately Dateless

One good thing about the Catholic Church is that it is definitelty attuned to personal difficulties. The Church is really a caring parent. While the secular world may organize "desperately dateless" balls to match up or give singles a chance to find happiness, the Church assigns a heavenly patron to every problem.

And with the global singles population increasing, the Pope has become concerned that the Vatican has assigned Saint Raphael the Archangel as the Patron of the Dateless on Valentine's Day!

Here is what EWTN says about it. For starters St Valentine isn't the patron of the dateless. For starters one needs to have found love in order to ask for St Valentine's intercession. But the Church isn't even sure how many St Valentine's are there. We are only sure of one thing, all these Valentines were martyred and their heads lopped off. Now we wonder how that was related to love. The Church had long removed St Valentine from the liturgical commemoration.

Maybe if you find true love your head will be figuratively lopped off. But if that's the case, why do lovers give each other migraines? Geoffrey Chaucer is believed to be the one who made this Valentine's Day and lovers gimmick in his poem "The Parliament of Birds". I was searching for a copy at the UP Library but it has been loaned out. I'll try to find it in Fully Booked at the Fort; where I have observed that the dateless seem to converge at the love and relationships section! And I noticed that the Love section is next to the Religion section. I think the bookshop has had it logically planned. The Science section is opposite the Love and Religion sections!

St Valentine's day may have pagan roots but doesn't Christmas and Easter have them too? But Chaucer was just observant of nature. Valentine's Day is all about sex.

He wrote

"For this was on seynt Volantynys day
Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make":

In 21st English this is how it goes

"For this was on Saint Valentine's day, when every bird comes there to choose his mate"

That's why the dateless really have it extremely bad..

So the Church really understands the problem very well.

Saint Raphael was the residential college near where I stayed when I was student in Australia. The residents were all single girls!

Saint Raphael's intercession brings wonders. While Saint Jude may intercede for the hopeless, Saint Raph intercedes for the dateless.

And the Church understands that being dateless isn't being hopeless!

Happy Saint Valentine's Day to those who love, have loved and will love.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Simoun's lamp has been lit, finally.. not by one but by the many!

"So often have we been haunted by the spectre of subversion which, with some fostering, has come to be a positive and real being, whose very name steals our serenity and makes us commit the greatest blunders... If before the reality, instead of changing the fear of one is increased, and the confusion of the other is exacerbated, then they must be left in the hands of time..." Dr Jose Rizal "To the Filipino People and their Government" Jose Rizal dominates the Luneta, which is sacred to the Philippine nation as a place of martyrdom. And many perhaps all of those executed in the Luneta, with the exception of the three Filipino secular priests martyred in 1872, have read Rizal's  El Filibusterismo . Dr Rizal's second novel is a darker and more sinister one that its prequel but has much significance across the century and more after it was published for it preaches the need for revolution with caveats,  which are when the time is right and who will in

Kung bakit dapat maging wikang pambansa din ang Ingles

Isang kakatwang eksena ang nasaksihan ko sa isang pribabdong opisina kamakailan lang. Dalawang empleyado ang inatasang bigyan ng solusyon ang isang isyu tungkol sa logistics. Ang isa ang tubong Davao at ang isa ay taga Iloilo. Ang unang wika nila ay Cebuano (Bisaya) at Hiligaynon (Ilonggo). Ang dalawang wika ay halos pareho ngunit may mga katagang iba ang kahulugan sa isa't isang wika. Ginamit nila ang wika nilang kinalakihan at hindi sila nagkaintindihan. Ang nangyari tuloy ay gumamit na lang sila ng wikang Ingles! Yung na nga rin ang sabi ko. Mag-English na lang kaya kayo! At bakit di wikang Filipino ang ginamit nila? Sa totoo lang, marami pa rin ang hindi bihasa sa Filipino upang gamitin ito sa mga larangan tulad ng logistics. At hindi lamang sa mga larangang teknikal, sa mga biyahe ko sa ibat-ibat lugar sa Pilipinas, ang mga naka-paskel sa mga CR o palikuran tungkol sa pagtitipid ng tubig ay naka sulat sa 1)Wika ng rehiyon 2) Wikang Ingles 3) at minsa'y sa wikang Filipino S

Leonard Co (1953-2010), Filipino botanist

With much sadness and shock I learned from WWF chair Lory Tan that internationally renowned botanist Leonard Co was killed together with a guide and a forest ranger last Monday, 15 November in a firefight in Leyte between Armed Forces of the Philippines soldiers and Communist guerrillas. As the Philippine Daily Inquirer reports it ,  Co and his researchers were surveying a forest plot of the Energy Development Corporation (EDC) for native Philippine trees and plants especially those that are in danger of extinction, like this Rafflesia flower (the picture I got from Dr Julie Barcelona's blog . Thank you Julie) The 41 year old Communist insurgency has again claimed another life of the best and brightest of the Philippines. In Leonard Co's case, a bright life that cannot be replaced. For he was one of if not the last of  the classically trained botanists in plant taxonomy and systematics in the Philippines. While one can learn the basics of these disciplines in