24 & 25 May 2025, 6th SUNDAY OF EASTER
Remain in My Love – A prelude to St Philip’s Day
The Collect of today’s Mass calls us to celebrate “these days of joy”, as the radiant Easter season begins to draw towards its close. Soon, we will celebrate the mystery of the Ascension of Our Lord and then the fire of Pentecost. After that, the Church turns “green” once more, and what we call “ordinary time” returns – not devoid of grace and joy, but full of opportunity to thank the Lord for His goodness to us. Yet here and now, before the liturgical shift, we are offered another opportunity to linger in the joy of the Resurrection and the triumph of divine love.
Tomorrow, our joy finds a new expression, as we mark the Solemnity of our Holy Father, Saint Philip Neri, the founder of the Oratory. It is a marvellous providence that the Gospel of this Sunday should speak of the coming of the Holy Spirit – precisely at the moment when our hearts are turning toward that event in 1544, when a young Florentine called Philip, praying in the catacombs of San Sebastiano, received an outpouring of the Spirit. From that moment, the Spirit came to dwell within his heart in a profound and transforming way. In some way, it was the fulfilment of Our Lord’s promise: “If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” These words echo in the liturgy of Saint Philip’s Day itself, in the voice of Saint Paul: “The love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit Who has come to dwell with us.” Saint Philip loved God, kept His commandments, and offered his heart as a home for the Lord. His was a heart made spacious by grace, warm with affection, alive with a joy that drew others to Christ.
This longing to love the Lord and to keep His commandments was shared by the early Church, as we hear in the First Reading. But zeal can sometimes make us difficult! Some of the Jewish converts, faithful to their tradition, were urging new believers to obey the commandments given to Moses, thinking it necessary to become Jews before becoming Christians. They were not malicious, but sincere – simply doing as they had always done, seeking to obey the law of God, as it had been handed down to them. Yet the Apostles, discerning the new freedom Christ brings, intervened. They laid down not the full weight of the Mosaic law, but rather a new and simpler “rule of life” suited to the Gospel – still morally serious, yet no longer burdened with the now-fulfilled, and superseded, requirements of the Old Covenant. This freedom was not licence, but grace, freeing them from superstition, cruelty, and immorality, and calling them into communion with Christ.
If we were to ask Saint Philip today what this freedom means for us, what rule he, as our father, might offer to those who desire to follow his way of loving God and keeping His commandments – how might he guide us? What shape might our devotion take, if we are to make our hearts a true home for God?
“Heartfelt devotion” to God
First, Saint Philip would surely speak to us of heartfelt devotion. The love of God must reign above all else in our lives. We must make a return to the Lord for His overwhelming goodness to us. This means cultivating a deep and personal relationship with the Holy Spirit, inviting Him daily into our hearts, and learning to recognise those interior promptings by which God urges us to do good and avoid evil. These gentle movements of grace – often subtle – are the voice of the Spirit forming our conscience and drawing us toward holiness. To hear these promptings, we must carve out time for silence and recollection, preferring the interior life when the world clamours for the exterior. Retreats and mental prayer nourish this life of the heart, and the Sacraments remain its vital source. Saint Philip loved the Blessed Sacrament ardently. It was the centre of his day, the fire around which he warmed himself and others. He championed frequent communion, long before it became common, and was devoted to Eucharistic adoration, especially in the Forty Hours devotion, being one of its chief proponents in the sixteenth century. Near the end of his life (the date of his death is the feast day we celebrate), he would see the Oratorian Father bringing him Holy Communion, and exclaim, “My love, my love; bring to me my love!” He knew, keenly, that God is truly present in the Sacrament of the altar. His love for the Holy Eucharist generated in him a tremendous ardour for the Sacred Liturgy: both in the location, and in the ars celebrandi, Saint Philip abhorred the banal and the sentimental, preferring what was glorious, fitting and beautiful for God, to Whom no honour could be considered lavish or extreme. Exquisite music, simple preaching, careful ceremony: these were ways in which the Sweetest of Fathers saw the love of God, and the keeping of his ceremonial commandments, make of human hearts a home.
This heartfelt devotion to God cannot, of course, neglect the confessional, where the Lord prepares us to be a fitting dwelling for His Majesty. Saint Philip spent many hours guiding and shriving souls, anticipating the ministry of saints like Saint John Vianney and Padre Pio.
His vitality sprang from this hidden life of grace, in which his heart, first made open to God, became increasingly open to others. About this point there is no doubt: Saint Philip opened his heart first for God – Whom he loved, and Whose commandments he obeyed – and then made his heart available to the world.
Spiritual friendship
Having been befriended by God, Saint Philip urges us to befriend His friends. Chief among them, of course, is the Blessed Virgin Mary, for whom Saint Philip had tremendous trust and affection. He regarded her as the true foundress of the Oratory, not with a mere sentimental reverence, but with a profound and abiding devotion. To be Oratorian, or to draw near to this way of life, is to love Our Lady deeply, to imitate the love Christ Himself bore for His Blessed Mother.
With whom was Saint Philip also a friend?
In the saints, those holy souls who have gone before us and now intercede for us, our holy Father found great companionship. Saint Philip delighted in their feast days, in preaching about their virtues, and in spiritual reading – he loved the writings of “his favourite authors” whose names, he said, began with “S”: Saint Augustine, Saint Bernard, and so on. He was a student of Saint Thomas Aquinas, being able to recall even in his old age the careful instruction of the Angelic Doctor as though he were a young student still at his desk. His conversations, and the Oratory sermons, were often filled with their wisdom, and his heart was nourished by their companionship, constantly seeking their intercession. Sometimes, they visited him in his wonderful ecstasies; he was the beneficiary of an apparition of Saint John the Apostle, and Saint John the Baptist, amongst others. And it should not be forgotten that he was the contemporary of many others who, inflamed with Divine love by his winning nature, would be numbered among the saints: Saint Ignatius, Saint Camillus and St Felix, to offer a tiny litany of the holy friends of our Saint.
He also fostered deep friendships with the faithful and with the priests who would eventually form the Oratory. For Saint Philip, community was not simply a social construct, but a spiritual gift. Like-minded souls, nourished by common prayer and fraternal joy – and occasionally a good practical joke – urged each other from good to better. He saw the familiar conversation between spiritual friends as an opportunity to break down our pride, increase our capacity for humility, and to soften the heart, making it a fitting dwelling place for God.
And we must not forget that Saint Philip was also a friend of the poor and the pilgrim. In 1550, a year that was also a Jubilee – just like this one – Saint Philip knelt to wash the feet of pilgrims. He recognised Christ in the stranger and the needy, and he served them not simply as an obligation but with love. He showed that the way to God passes through the humility of service. He urged his disciples to attend to the needs of the poor, even if they were interrupted in their prayers, seeing that they could abandon Christ in their private prayer to attend to Christ, Who made a home in the needy.
In the end, Saint Philip shows us what it means to love God with all our heart: to keep His commandments not as burdens, but as the joyful steps of friendship with Christ. When we love God truly, we begin to desire what He desires, and our hearts are gradually shaped into a dwelling place fit for His presence. In this way, we welcome the Lord into our lives and prepare ourselves for that greater home to which He leads us: the eternal joy of heaven. May our holy Father look down from heaven, and pray for us. Amen.