A picnic with St Phillip Neri
As we approach his feast, what does this joyful Saint have to teach us?
It will be the Florentines feast day on the 26th May, a date special to me personally as it was he I chose as patron saint for my confirmation when I became Catholic as an adult. He combined a heart toward the poor with an eccentric and quirky sense humour but in addition, a reforming zeal that touched the lives of the poor and powerful. He was an everyman that ministered the love of God to those despised and did so using old and new ways alike. He for instance brought to Rome the 40 hours devotion (Quarant’Ore) and tasked the newly established Confraternity of the Most Holy Trinity to not only look after pilgrims, but to practice the devotion monthly. As he said:
‘Our sweet Jesus, through the excess of His love and liberality, has left Himself to us in the Most Holy Sacrament.’
He also sent out his brothers to preach in Rome’s churches and he began his famous seven churches walk. This was a day pilgrimage between 7 of Rome’s churches still carried out today during Holy Week. The pilgrimage brought together a spiritual practice, fellowship and food open to all. He was a fool yet influential with Popes; he had deep sense of the peoples spiritual needs but had a very personal and individual piety. The most famous example of this is his enlarged heart – when, just before Pentecost, calling out in prayer to the Holy Spirit he saw a fiery globe appear in front of him and enter his body, which not only had the spiritual effect of a profound and marked joy that characterized the rest of his life but also a physically enlarged heart.
He had what you might call ecstatic experiences and inaugurated spiritual practices, encouraging personal devotion but always with the eye not to be drawn to something for the sake of it but so as to conform to Christ most perfectly. This approachable and pragmatic Saint said of spiritual practices:
‘It is not a good thing to load ourselves with many spiritual exercises; it is better to undertake a little, and go on with it; for if the devil can persuade us to omit an exercise once, he will easily get us to omit it a second time, and the third, until at last all our pious practices will melt away’.
He called for serious devotion to the Lord but warned against the hypocrisy of those who look and sound holy and are anything but. In that he is not referring necessarily to the debauched, (although I am sure he had them in mind too) but those who can say the right thing and pray the right way, and are yet far from it internally. The danger for instance in so called ‘trad-Catholicism’ and the recent surge in interest in traditional Christian values in the public sphere is that it is closer to the performative rather than linked to an interior devotion to Christ. Obviously that is not the case for all, but for those of us who love the Tridentine mass, pilgrimages and processions – it is a warning we should heed; the devil loves inducing spiritual pride in those serious about God and His Church.
All these combined elements of his life and activity are unique but also goes to show God does not make two Saints alike – you do not read the Epistle of St James and get the same sense of mirth! But if God does not make two Saints the same, He also does not wish it for only a select few which St Phillip embraced, seeing the possibilities in prostitutes and the prelates alike.
As we approach May 25th it might be worth asking him for his prayers as we seek the wisdom of God on bringing the reconversion of Scotland’s heart to Christ. A way to start that might be participating in a Holy Hour near you.
By Eric Hanna