St Philip Neri (1515 – 1595) was born in Florence into the chaos of the reformation and grew up in a corrupted church. He was known as “Pippo Buono” translated as “good old Phil.” He was a young and cheerful presence with a strong prayer life. He was persistently cheerful, compassionate, and kind. It was said that people were drawn to him like iron to a magnet. Originally Philip wanted to go to India as a missionary priest, but he remained in Italy, to help the country recover from its corruption by changing hearts and minds. He wasn’t a great thinker, neither was he any kind of prophet in the normal sense but he was to his time, something much more valuable. He was a listener.
Philip used the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation (confession) as spiritual direction for thousands of people in Rome. He would spend up to sixteen hours a day in the confessional and was available in the church since he lived in a room above the church, which he called his oratory. Almost by accident, he founded a religious order to continue this work. We should take inspiration from Philip’s ordinariness because it reminds us that being cheerful, and listening is a pathway to holiness.
But Don Bosco used St. Philip of Neri as an icon of cheerfulness, a joke teller, a trickster, and clown that sat comfortably alongside his ability to listen. Philip was able to bring fun and joy into every moment because he believed deeply in God’s providence. In the words of the mystic Julian of Norwich he believed that:
All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things shall be well
With that strong faith nothing could get Philip down, he was always smiling and doing things that would help others to smile. He had a joke book with him and read jokes to people regularly. He raised people’s spirits and allowed them to open their hearts to him whilst maintaining proper boundaries in our modern language. Philip lived gratitude for life, even when it was difficult because of this he was dubbed the “merriest man alive” by Goethe.
Don Bosco used St Philip Neri’s approach as a justification for noisy boisterous games and even loud music. Philip said young to people “Do as you wish; I do not care so long as you do not sin.” Don Bosco said to his boys “Run, jump, make noise, but do not sin”. It seems that good play leaves no room for the sadness or bitterness of sin in people’s lives. It was an approach that inspired the Pulitzer prize winning author Phyllis McGinley to write this about St Philip Neri:
Two books he read with most affection—
The Gospels and a joke collection;
And sang hosannas set to fiddles
And fed the sick on soup and riddles.
So, when the grave rebuke the merry,
Let them remember Philip Neri.
Philip is the patron of the little virtues in Salesian spirituality: playfulness, gratitude, fun, trust, and friendship. He applied all those attitudes to people and to his God. That playfulness was the chronological starting point of Don Bosco’s way of working and the thread runs through all his education, prayer, liturgy, and relationship-building.
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