The icon of St. Philip Neri from Monastery is shown as it is painted from beginning to end in brief time-lapse fashion. This icon is availble from Monastery Icons here in a wide range of sizes and formats:
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Canonized the same day in 1622 as Saints Teresa of Avila, Francis Xavier, Isidore the Farmer, and Ignatius Loyola, Saint Philip Neri is great example of the uniqueness of each of God’s saints.
Born in 1515 in Florence, Italy, at the age of 18 he travelled to Rome where after a short time as a student he took up a hermetic life, praying in the catacombs at night. When he was 29, one night before Pentecost while at prayer he saw a globe of fire which entered him and descended into his heart, filling him with great joy and divine love. Putting his hand to his heart, he found a swelling there as a big as a man’s fist. For the remaining fifty years of Saint Philip’s life, during times of prayer, celebrating Mass, hearing confessions, and speaking of his most beloved spiritual themes he frequently experienced palpitations of the heart so loud and violent that some likened them to the blows of hammer. After his death it was discovered his heart was twice the normal size, but with no evidence of disease.
This “large heartedness” was the perfect physical image of his spirit. As a young man he began a ministry for needy pilgrims in Rome. This work later expanded into a celebrated hospital for poor convalescents, which by 1575 assisted no less than 145,000 pilgrims. Many young men of Roman were inspired by his guidance and example to reform their dissolute and wasteful lives. To accommodate the growing numbers who were attracted to the spiritual conferences Saint Philip held in the afternoons and evenings, a new larger room was built over the nave of San Girolamo known simply as the Oratory - a name which would later become the basis for the religious order he founded, the Oratorians.
Spontaneous and humorous, “the Apostle of Rome” knew that people required many different ways to dissolve the egotism that comes between us and God. When a man asked Saint Philip permission to wear a hair shirt, he agreed - if he wore the shirt on the outside of his clothes! When one priest gave a particularly beautiful sermon, Saint Philip ordered him to give the same sermon six times in a row so people would think he was a “one-sermon priest.”
Saint Philip was no less radical with himself, and his mortification no less humorous. On occasion he is said to have appeared in public in ridiculous clothes or with half his beard shaved off. When some visitors from Poland came to see “the great saint,” he received them by having another priest read to him from joke books.
“The wisdom of the scriptures is learned rather by prayer than by study.”
“Excessive sadness seldom springs from any other source than pride.”
“A man without prayer is an animal without the use of reason.”