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Praying with the Saints: Saint Philip Neri
00:20:17
Discover how Saint Philip Neri— the smiling saint who turned prayer into an art of holy friendship—taught ordinary people to meet God right in the middle of daily life, and how his Oratory unexpectedly birthed one of music’s most prayerful creations. Packed with his own witty, down-to-earth wisdom you can use today, join Dr. Jessica Ewell and Dr. Elizabeth Klein for the second in a monthly series of new episodes within the Catholic Saints podcast that focuses on "Praying with the Saints." If you would like to learn more about the life and legacy of Saint Philip Neri, search for his name in the Augustine Institute's podcast channel.
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- [00:02]
Podcast Host (Augustine Institute Announcer)
You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Hello and welcome to Catholic Saints, the podcast about the lives of the saints and their legacy for the church and for us. Hi, I'm Dr. Elizabeth Klein, and I'm joined today by Dr. Jessica Ewell. Today we're going to be something a little bit different. Instead of just talking about the life of Philip Neri, we're going to talk about his life of prayer and specifically what he can offer us for our own prayer life as we learn to get closer to God. So that's going to be really exciting. Welcome, Jessica.
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Dr. Jessica Ewell
Thanks. I'm glad to be here.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
So Dr. Ewell is a music professor, which is a little different from some of the boring theology people you hear
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Dr. Jessica Ewell
on Catholic Saints Podcasting. Amazing people.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
So what kind of classes are the favorite classes for a music professor to teach?
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Dr. Jessica Ewell
So I'm a music person who loves theology and philosophy, and I love teaching classes that show connections between philosophy, theology, and evangelization through culture. So creating culture, infusing culture with truth and beauty. Those are some of my favorite things to talk about.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
That sounds great. I hope that there's a tie in with Philip, Mary. I guess we'll see.
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Dr. Jessica Ewell
There actually is.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Okay.
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Dr. Jessica Ewell
Yes.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Spoiler, spoiler.
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Dr. Jessica Ewell
I don't know. A tiny bit of foreshadowing. We'll talk about that in a bit. We'll get there.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
So why don't you just give us a bit of a reminder? Who is St. Philip Neri? So we'll kind of just go back briefly over who he is, and then we'll get into maybe some of his more detailed stuff on prayer.
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Dr. Jessica Ewell
Absolutely. So he was born in Florence, and he was born around the time of some of the other great reformers that we know about and lived during a very similar time. He knew Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Loyola, for example. And he was actually canonized at the same time as St. Ignatius and. And St. Teresa of Jesus, to name just a few. And actually, he was canonized at the same time as Saint Isidore the farmer, which is pretty cool. So he was born in Florence in 1515. His father was a notary, and his father was also a great admirer of the Dominican reformer Savonarola, so much so that he sent Philip to be educated with the Dominicans at San Marco. And this is where his connection with music and prayer actually begins, because one of his teachers there was Servazio Mini, who wrote books of what are called laude, which is an older musical form. It started in the Middle Ages, and it was a form of music that was used in lay confraternities, among other situations. People would get together and sing these songs, which would then lead them into deeper prayer. So St. Philip, from his very early days, was very familiar with the laude. And so he went to Rome and he studied with the Augustinians for about a year. And he wasn't quite sure what he wanted to do, but he knew that he wanted to serve God. So he had this very dual life as what we would think of as an urban hermit and also somebody who was being very active, working in the hospitals and trying to do as much in charity as possible. And in 1544, during Pentecost, he had a mystical experience where he just felt the love of God literally filling his heart to bursting. And from there, he became more and more active in the city. He started to gather a group of laymen around him in 1548 for the care of pilgrims. So this was a very important time in rome because in 1550, they had the Holy Year, kind of a jubilee year. And so there were loads of people coming from everywhere to Rome, and they needed to be cared for. There wasn't, you know, Airbnb or something. They had lots of pilgrims who needed the basics. And so St Philip and his friends started to gather to do good works, to care for pilgrims and to pray together. He became a priest in 1551, and then his congregation of the oratory began to grow and really came into its own in the 1550s, and it was finally recognized in 1575. And then our saint died in 1595. So just a brief sketch of his life. We don't have very many writings from him, but we do have some. We have about 30 letters, and then we have some other scattered writings and actually some sonnets. I think two of them weren't even his. Maybe one was. And then the biggest source of spiritual advice we have from him are his maxims. And these were collected very soon after his death because his brothers got started right away on the canonization process. And so they started collecting his sayings from people who knew him, some of his first students and his friends. And so the first collection of these came from January of 1596, so very, very soon after that.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Oh, that's cool. So they kind of. And the oratorians, of course, are still around today.
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Dr. Jessica Ewell
Absolutely.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Running oratories around the world. And so is that kind of. So his friends kind of went around asking people like, what are Things that he said to you.
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Dr. Jessica Ewell
Yeah. Or they would remember them themselves. There were a few fathers who submitted some of these maxims as part of the canonization process. From memories. Yeah.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
It kind of reminds me. I don't know if this is the case, but a while ago we did the life of St. Bruno, and he has one of these, like, mortuary rolls where people would, like, go around and they'd say, like, oh, yeah, we'll pray for the repose of Bruno, or here's a memory. And this was common in the Middle Ages to go around and collect these roles. So it sounds like that, but, like, amped up kind of. It's like it's on a similar process, which is really interesting.
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Dr. Jessica Ewell
Yeah, yeah. And it's really great because Philip was not a fan of writing down or thinking about himself or talking about himself. He wanted to keep his spiritual life as secret as possible. And this arose because of his great humility and his wanting to keep that mystery, that intimacy between God and himself. And so it's great that we have these memories from his close friends and associates.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Well, now. So now I'm more curious than ever. If he kept his interior life so secret, then what can we know about his prayer life? Or how should we learn about his prayer life?
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Dr. Jessica Ewell
So there's so much. It was so fun preparing this because, like, how am I going to just make everything distill everything? Because there's so much to say? So let's just talk first about Philip's life, about what we know about him. He was an urban hermit, so he would go into the catacombs and pray there a lot. He wanted to really know God and love God and be with him as much as possible. But at the same time, he's the example of this classic paradigm of contemplation pouring into activity. And so he had a very active life within the city. And a lot of people think of him as a jokester and somebody who, you know, is the jongleur kind of the very comic figure. But, you know, that was just a very small part of the picture. And I do want to pause there, though, because his joy and his emphasis on importance of joy is something that I think we can all learn from today. And I want to share just a couple of quotes that come from his maxims. The first one, he says, cheerfulness strengthens the heart and makes us persevere in a good life. Wherefore the servant of God ought always to be in good spirits. So no dour Christians around there. And then he also identifies joy as a gift of the Holy Spirit, as not just some sort of fizziness on top of champagne or bubbles that go away really quickly. But he says joy is something that the Holy Spirit gives us. And in the words of Philip, the Holy Spirit is the master of prayer and causes us to abide in continual peace and cheerfulness, which is a foretaste of paradise. So he puts it right up there with other gifts that are super important in prayer. So another thing about Philip that he lived so beautifully was kind of a foreshadowing to the call up to universal holiness that we've heard so much about with St. John Paul II. He was very adamant that it didn't matter if you were a layperson, if you were a priest, if you were religious, holiness is within your grasp. He said, let persons in the world sanctify themselves in their own houses, for neither the court, professions or labor are any hindrance to the service of God. It's a beautiful foreshadowing of universal call to holiness.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
There's also strikes me the idea of him being an urban hermit and the sort of imagery of him going into the catacombs to then come up into the city is sort of a picture of the life of prayer. Right. You have to go into your room and close the door and pray to your father. He sees you in secret. And all that stuff that goes on underneath the surface, so to speak, is actually what allows, what builds up as the foundation for the works of charity that happens sort of more publicly. And that it's in the city is sort of special for lay people. Even though he was a priest?
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Dr. Jessica Ewell
Yeah, absolutely. And him becoming a priest was not. Not even something that he sort of premeditated. His confessor was like, you know, you should become a priest. He's like, okay, so he became a priest. But it wasn't something that he started out thinking that was going to happen right away, like he was still trying to figure out what God had for him.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
That's very interesting.
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Dr. Jessica Ewell
One of the things I love about him is his pithy advice. And so this is where sort of his down to earth kind of nature comes into it. So I'm going to share three pieces of pithy advice about prayer. And the first one, he says, let everyone stay at home that is within himself and sit in judgment on his own actions without going abroad to investigate and criticize those of others. I love that one. Another thing he says is a man should not ask tribulations of God, presuming on his being able to bear them. There should be the greatest possible caution in this matter. For he who bears what God sends him daily does not do a small thing. So don't try to bite off too much.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Right.
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Dr. Jessica Ewell
In pursuing holiness. And finally, it is very useful for those who minister the word of God or give themselves up to prayer to read the works of authors whose names begin with s, such as St. Augustine, St. Bernard, et cetera. So I love that.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
That's funny. Which Ashworth. I read one said whose name began with S. Yeah, right, exactly.
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Dr. Jessica Ewell
So especially when it comes to prayer, Philip was. He was. He was very devoted to confession. So he spent hours in the confessional, and he knew souls, and he spent a lot of time with young people and with people who wanted to become serious about the spiritual life. So he has a lot of advice for us as we try to grow in our relationship with God. And again, this is one of those places, like, what am I going to pick? So I want to just talk a little bit about his idea that you shouldn't try to do everything but do a few things. So he said, don't load yourselves down with many devotions. Commit to few, but persevere in those. So in Italian, non tante devotioni, ma tanta devozione. So not many devotions, but much devotion. I love that. It's really, really cool.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah. That seems related to kind of the simplicity that he was seeking for in some of the previous quotations that you already read. You know, to stay at home, to not ask God to load on things. I think this is very salutary advice for us today because I think quite often we have access to infinite information.
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Dr. Jessica Ewell
Yeah.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
And if we're on any kind of social media or Catholic social media, there can be kind of a deluge of, oh, I could do this for this feast or that for this. Oh, and there's this other prayer, and, oh, there's this other saying, this other devotion. Yeah. And so I joke. I mean, we do the Catholic Saints podcast. We want you to get to know the saints. But I do think in the case of the saints, like I like to say, don't. Don't friend the saints. Don't just like the saints, you know, actually meet a few of them in person rather than collecting a whole bunch at arm's length. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
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Dr. Jessica Ewell
And I think St. Philip Neri has so much to teach us today, and a lot of the things that we've adopted as faithful, actually, we can trace back to him sometimes. It's not that he originated them, but maybe he made them well known and this brings me to my connection as a musician with St Philip Neri. And so he formed the oratory and. And the oratory, it was used in his time to talk about the place where they met, which is a prayer hall. It comes from orazione, or prayer, a place of prayer. And then they would also call themselves the oratory. So the fathers of the oratory, for example. And this is where the musical genre of the oratorio actually started. And for those of you who have listened to Handel's Messiah or to Haydn's Creation, these are later examples of oratorio. So the earliest ones were very different in form, but they originated here with St. Philip Neri and with his idea that we should pray, we should enrich the spiritual life through music. And he actually owned a book of laude by one of the most famous composers of laude, the Franciscan Jacopone Bathodi, who was living in the 13th century. And he cared about them so much that he would use these laude, these songs, as a basis for some of the spiritual exercises that they would do every day in the oratory. And so the way that the oratorio began was as an elaboration of these spiritual songs, which had some narrative elements in them, some dramatic elements in them. And so. And I'm not saying that the oratorio is just an outgrowth of the lauda, but it was definitely a big influence and sort of the seed of these big narrative works.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Sorry, Isa, the oratorios, like Candles, Messiah, which I am familiar with, are they primarily scriptural? Is that common to them? Because, as you know, Messiah is only passages through Scripture. Is that like kind of a standard thing?
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Dr. Jessica Ewell
So they really vary. They can be very scriptural, as in Messiah, or they can be, in fact, Messiah is scriptural, but it did have a librettist. Jennens was the librettist, who put the passages together and sort of made them into a whole. But then they could also be very poetic as well. But the main sort of aim of these oratorios was to bring people deeper through the affections, through the heart and through. Through not just the mind, but in feeling and in experiencing the lives of the saints, salvation, history, and then through that, entering more deeply into prayer. So St. Philip Neroy would take people on pilgrimages around the city to these different churches, and after that, so they go to the seven great churches in Rome, and then they would go and have wine and food in a beautiful garden outside. And then they would have the spiritual exercises, which would include an oratorio or some kind of Music that was a precursor of the oratorio. And it's really neat. In the. In the financial records, as early as 1600, we see that they were paying for. So this wasn't just everybody get together and, like, sing with nothing. It was they paid for an organ, singers, lutes and wind instruments for some of these outdoor oratorios. And so we have this legacy with us today thanks to St. Philip Neri and his oratory. And so as a singer and loving this genre, it was really fun for me to dive deeply into the life of the man who really started it
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
all, St Philip Neri and the sort of the prayer life that underpinned it. All right, so this is fascinating. I didn't know a lot of this stuff about Philip Neri or the foundations of the oratory, and there's so many kind of little bits and bobs and pieces of wisdom we could take. So maybe what do you think are a top thing or two that people could really take from St. Philip to their own prayer life, you know, today? Yeah.
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Dr. Jessica Ewell
So St. Philip was a very big advocate of small prayers, raising your minds throughout the day to God.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
For.
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Dr. Jessica Ewell
But he was also. So let me. Let me just maybe take a step back. So there's one general thing that I'm going to say and one very specific piece of advice. So the one general thing is read holy books and discuss them as a way into prayer, a doorway to prayer. That's really how the oratory got started. People would come to St. Philip's Little Attic room and they would read and discuss spiritual books as a doorway to prayer. And then as more and more people came, they needed more and more room. So the oratory grew. And then a very specific way that we can practice in the. In The Spirit of St Philip Neri is through raising our mind to God in small prayers throughout the day. I'm going to again go back to reading from St. Philip and he would explain it this way. He says to keep alive the thought of the divine presence and to strengthen confidence in God, some short prayers are really useful and to launch these many times throughout the day toward heaven, raising the mind to God from the mud of this world. And the one who uses these will bear incredible fruit from them without great toil. So as much as you can, just raise your mind in small prayers throughout the day to God.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
That's awesome. I love that. I love that tip. That's so wonderful. It reminds me my husband is Byzantine, has spent a lot of time in the Byzantine tradition, and of course, they're Big fans of the Jesus prayer, which is something. Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Something so simple you could say, or Jesus, I trust in you. These small things, if we have them to heart and you know, to hand, so to speak, throughout the trials of the day. That's wonderful. It reminds me also of Francis de Sales, who I also was active in this time, has very similar kind of advice.
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Dr. Jessica Ewell
Yeah. And Brother Lawrence, too. That idea of just always remembering that you're in the presence of God.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah, wonderful.
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Dr. Jessica Ewell
Yeah. So I want to just maybe end with some advice. And also if you guys want to know more about St. Philip Neri, we do have another podcast on him that's more focused on his life. So if you just type in Philip Neri in the search field, you'll be able to find it there as well, which will be really great.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Wonderful. All right, well, this was a lot of fun. So read holy books. Author name beginning with S. Unfortunately, yes, that's right. That doesn't qualify for me.
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Dr. Jessica Ewell
But you know, also go listen to some oratorios. That's right, that's right. And then I'm gonn end with just one more quote. I can't help it. I'm overflowing with quotes from St. Philip Neri.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Absolutely.
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Dr. Jessica Ewell
Please do so. He says this, and I think this really gives us sort of a window into his. Into his spirit and his way of praying. He says, when the soul lies resignedly in the hands of God and is contented with the divine pleasure, it is in good hands and has the best security, that good will happen to it.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Wonderful. All St Philip Neri, pray for us.
- [19:36]
Podcast Host (Augustine Institute Announcer)
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