No love lost over Dublin’s St Valentine Shrine medal scam

Dublin’s St Valentine’s Shrine has warned against an internet scam around medals falsely linked with the shrine.

Highlighting how a website is selling medals of St Valentine purporting to contain soil from Whitefriar Street Church, which houses the Shrine of St Valentine, Carmelite authorities have denied that any soil has been taken from the church.

“No soil has been taken from beneath the shrine and neither has any soil been taken from the environs of the church, and therefore their ‘Certificate of Authenticity’ is fake. The medals being sold do not come from Whitefriar Street Church and are not being sold on our behalf,” the church has declared in a statement by the community sub-prior Fr P.J. Breen.

Fr Breen stressed that neither the Carmelites nor Whitefriar Street Church had any connection with the website and had not given permission for the use of photographs of the church and shrine.

The relics of St Valentine have been at Whitefriar Street Church, officially the Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, since 1836, when they were given to Fr John Spratt by Pope Gregory XV in gratitude for the Irish Carmelite’s preaching.