Philip Neri and the Fire That Broke His Ribs

I found Philip Neri laughing, and I did not correct that about him — I built on it. He came to Rome from Florence as a young layman with no plan to be ordained, tutoring children for his keep, sleeping in a spare room, spending his nights not in taverns but on his knees in the catacombs of San Sebastiano along the Appian Way, alone in the dark among the bones of the first martyrs, asking me for the one thing a young man in a corrupt, exhausted Renaissance Rome most needed to ask for: more of Me. He did not ask to be extraordinary. He asked to burn.

I answered him on the vigil of Pentecost, in the year 1544, in that same catacomb. I do not owe anyone an explanation of how I choose to arrive, but that night I let him feel Me as fire — a globe of flame, entering through his mouth, dropping into his chest, and staying there. He fell to the ground. When he rose, his heart was pounding so hard against his ribs that he could feel it from across the room, and it did not stop for the rest of his life. I want to be honest about what I did to his body, because I let doctors examine it long after he had stopped being able to explain it away as excitement: I enlarged his heart. Not figuratively. When he died fifty-one years later and physicians opened him for the customary examination, they found the heart swollen far beyond its ordinary size, and two ribs over it broken and bowed outward, permanently, to give it room. A man does not live half a century with two broken ribs from a private ecstasy unless something was actually there. I let the wound outlast the memory of the wounding, the same discipline I would later ask of Padre Pio, because a fire that only burns once is easy to doubt, and I wanted Rome to have something it could not doubt.

What I wanted from that fire was not spectacle. Philip spent the years after it walking the streets of Rome — not preaching from a pulpit at first, but talking to bankers, barbers, beggars, and prostitutes where he found them, making them laugh before he made them pray, because he understood, as few holy men of his century did, that I am not only found in solemnity. He gathered young men for prayer and conversation in a room above the church of San Girolamo della Carità, informal, unranked, full of music and argument and his own relentless jokes at his own expense, and out of those gatherings I built something durable: the Congregation of the Oratory, formally established in 1575 at the church the Romans still call the Chiesa Nuova. He was ordained a priest in 1551, reluctantly, only after his confessor insisted that a man burning the way he was burning belonged at the altar and not merely beside it.

I let him become, without ever seeking the title, the Apostle of Rome — a city that in his lifetime had seen the Sack of 1527 and the moral wreckage of a corrupt papal court, and that needed, more than another reformer with a program, a saint who could make holiness look like the most enjoyable thing available. He heard confessions for hours at a stretch, sometimes from dawn until nearly noon, and he read the hidden state of the souls in front of him with an accuracy his penitents found unsettling and then, almost always, disarming, because he delivered the truth about them with a smile rather than a scourge. He distrusted piety that curdled into gloom. He told his followers that a joyful heart is more likely to reach perfection than a sad one, and I let that become one of the truest things ever said about how I actually work in a soul.

He died on the feast of Corpus Christi, May 26, 1595, in Rome, the fire still burning in a heart that had carried it, visibly enlarged and audibly loud, for fifty-one years. I did not put it out. I simply, finally, let him come home to where it had always been leading him.

The Record

Philip Neri (born July 21, 1515, Florence) came to Rome around 1533 as a layman and spent years in prayer, catechesis, and works of charity among the city's poor before his ordination to the priesthood in 1551. On the vigil of Pentecost, 1544, while praying in the catacombs of San Sebastiano, he experienced a mystical event described as a ball of fire entering his chest, after which he reported a persistent physical palpitation and heat in his heart for the remainder of his life.

In 1575 he formally established the Congregation of the Oratory, a community of secular priests devoted to prayer, preaching, and pastoral care, centered from 1583 at the Chiesa Nuova (Santa Maria in Vallicella) in Rome. He became renowned for his humor, his gift for reading souls in confession, and his personal austerity combined with public joyfulness, earning him the title "Apostle of Rome."

Philip Neri died on May 26, 1595, in Rome. His autopsy, performed by physicians of the period and later cited in the canonization process, documented an enlarged heart with two ribs fractured and permanently displaced outward over it — a finding that entered the official record of his cause. He was beatified in 1615 by Pope Paul V and canonized on March 12, 1622, by Pope Gregory XV, in the same ceremony as Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Ávila, and Francis Xavier. Feast day: May 26.