May 20th. St. Philip Neri.

Born in Florence in 1515, he underwent a conversion experience which caused him to give up a possible career in business and go, without specific plans, to Rome, where he soon created his own mission speaking of Christ to fellow Florentines who worked in Rome. In 1544 in the Catacomb of St. Sebastian he received a special spiritual experience in the form of a vision of a ball of fire entering his mouth and swelling his heart. Intensifying his own work, he was ordained priest in 1551 and became a much sought-after confessor at San Girolamo della Carita, a church almost opposite the English College. A loose fraternity of priests in this church was to develop under him into the Congregation of the Oratory, who share a common life but do not take vows. Philip became particularly well known as a preacher, and also for the development of the semi-formal musical service known as an "Oratory" which is the origin of the musical form known as the oratorio, a religious story set to music (like Handel's "Messiah"). In 1577 the Oratorians moved to a new Roman church, the Chiesa Nuova, which they still occupy today. Philip became well known to English students of the English College, greeting them as they prepared for the mission in Reformation England with the words of the hymn "Hail, flowers of martyrs". In his personal piety a man of intense devotion (his Mass would sometimes last for several hours as he silently pondered the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist) in his external manner he sometimes used eccentricity and humour in order to prick people's pride: his penances included making people carry large dogs round Rome or writing a history of the Church. When he heard someone comment on his holiness he ran into the church with half of his beard shaved off. On one occasion he removed the hair-pins from the head of an affected aristocratic lady of Rome as she made her confession before him. He died on the feast of Corpus Christi, 1595, and was canonised in 1622; his shrine is in the Chiesa Nuova in Rome.