Feast day: May 26
St. Philip Neri
The 'Apostle of Rome' who re-evangelized a corrupt city with confession, conversation, music, and relentless good humor, founding the Oratory.
Philip Neri was born at Florence in 1515 and as a young man gave up the prospect of a merchant's fortune to go to Rome, where he lived in poverty, tutoring and praying, and underwent a profound mystical experience of the Holy Spirit that, tradition says, left his heart physically enlarged. The Rome of his day was worldly and spiritually cold, and Philip set out, almost single-handedly and entirely by personal charm, to win it back to fervor.
He had an extraordinary gift for friendship and for joy. Long before he was ordained he roamed the streets and markets striking up conversations, drawing people — especially the young — with his warmth and humor, then leading them to prayer, to care for the sick in the hospitals, and to visit the great churches. Out of these informal gatherings grew the Oratory, a community of priests bound not by vows but by charity, and a new, popular style of devotion that even drew the music of Palestrina.
Philip distrusted gloom and self-importance, and used laughter and odd, deliberately humbling pranks — wearing absurd clothes, asking ridiculous questions — to puncture vanity, in others and above all in himself. 'Cheerfulness strengthens the heart,' he liked to say, and he became known as the 'Apostle of Rome' and a saint of holy mirth.
Sought out by popes and cardinals as well as by beggars and boys, he spent hours in the confessional and was credited with reading hearts. He died in Rome in 1595, full of years and joy, and was canonized in 1622, remembered as the saint who proved that holiness and happiness belong together.
He sometimes wore his clothes inside out or shaved half his beard — deliberately courting ridicule to stay humble.
“A joyful heart is more easily made perfect than a downcast one.”
— St. Philip Neri
Image: Sebastiano Conca (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/12018b.htm
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