St. Philip Neri

Philip Neri begins as the cheerful and devout Florentine boy called Pippo buono, but the real turn comes when, still very young, he leaves inheritance and worldly security behind and goes to Rome with no settled plan except to belong to God. There he lives with startling simplicity, teaches two small boys in return for board, prays for long hours in a bare room, studies for a time, and then drops academic ambition altogether so that he can give himself directly to souls. He moves through the streets, hospitals, churches, and catacombs of Rome, speaking with shop clerks and idlers, gathering people for prayer, taking them to serve the sick, and slowly helping revive a city whose faith had grown slack. The famous Pentecost grace in the catacombs, when divine love seemed to seize his whole body, stands near the center of the life, but it is not treated as an isolated marvel.

It belongs to a man increasingly consumed by charity. Philip founds the confraternity that cared for pilgrims and helped spread the Forty Hours devotion, is ordained priest in 1551, and then spends himself above all in the confessional, in spiritual conversations, and in the little oratory from which the Oratory itself would grow. The end of his life remains richly human: his playful humility, his strange freedom with princes and cardinals, the miracles and prophecies others noticed, his reluctance to live like an important founder, and his final years in the Chiesa Nuova, still drawing souls until he dies after blessing his sons with his last strength.