What I know about St. Philip Neri is largely derived from Cardinal (now Saint) John Henry Newman, who held a special devotion to the Florentine saint. The following is Newman’s, taken from Sermons Preached on Various Occasions. (The Newman Reader also provides the full text.)
Savonarola, in spite of his personal sanctity, in spite of his protests against a mere external sanctity in Catholics, after all, began with an external reform; he burned lutes and guitars, looking-glasses and masks, books and pictures, in the public square: but Philip bore with every outside extravagance in those whom he addressed, as far as it was not directly sinful, knowing well that if the heart was once set right, the appropriate demeanour would follow. You recollect how a youth came to his Exercises one day, dressed out "in a most singular and whimsical fashion"; and how Philip did but fix his eyes on him, and proceed with the discourses and devotions of the Oratory, and how, by the time that they were at an end, the poor sinner had become quite another man; his nature was changed all at once, and he became one of the Saint's most fervent penitents. A rich ecclesiastic came to him in coloured clothes, like a layman: Philip talked with him for a fortnight, without saying a word about his dress. At the end of the time he put it off of his own accord, and made a general confession. His biographer says: "He was very much against stiffness and off-hand prohibitions about wearing fine clothes, collars, swords, and such-like things, saying that if only a little devotion gained admittance into their hearts, you might leave them to themselves." If he spoke of them, it was good-naturedly and playfully. You recollect he said to a lady, who asked if it was a sin to wear slippers with very high heels, according to an excessive fashion of the day, "Take care they do not trip you up." And to a youth, who wore one of those large, stiff frills, which we see in pictures, he remarked, "I should caress you much more, if your collar did not hurt me."
Savonarola is associated in our minds with the pulpit rather than the confessional: his vehemence converted many, but frightened or irritated more. The consequences came back upon himself and his penitents. Some of his convert artists were assassinated, others were driven into exile, others gave up their profession altogether in disgust or despair. Philip had no vocation, and little affection, for the pulpit; he was jealous of what the world calls eloquence, and he mortified his disciples when they aspired to it. One he interrupted and sent down; another he made preach his sermons six times over: he discoursed and conversed rather than preached. And "he could not endure harsh rebukes," says the writer of his life, "or anything like rigour. He allured men to the service of God so dexterously, and with such a holy, winning art, that those who saw it cried out, astonished: 'Father Philip draws souls as the magnet draws iron.' He so accommodated himself to the temper of each, as, in the words of the Apostle, to become 'all things to all men, that he might gain all.'" And his love of them individually was so tender and ardent, that, even in extreme old age, he was anxious to suffer for their sins; and "for this end he inflicted on himself severe disciplines, and he reckoned their misdeeds as his own, and wept for them as such." I do not read that Savonarola acted thus towards Pope Alexander the Sixth, whom he so violently denounced.
It required to live in Rome to understand what his influence really was. Nothing was too high for him, nothing too low. He taught poor begging women to use mental prayer; he took out boys to play; he protected orphans; he acted as novice-master to the children of St. Dominic. He was the teacher and director of artisans, mechanics, cashiers in banks, merchants, workers in gold, artists, men of science. He was consulted by monks, canons, lawyers, physicians, courtiers; ladies of the highest rank, convicts going to execution, engaged in their turn his solicitude and prayers. Cardinals hung about his room, and Popes asked for his miraculous aid in disease, and his ministrations in death. It was his mission to save men, not from, but in, the world. To break the haughtiness of rank, and the fastidiousness of fashion, he gave his penitents public mortifications; to draw the young from the theatres, he opened his Oratory of Sacred Music; to rescue the careless from the Carnival and its excesses, he set out in pilgrimage to the Seven Basilicas. For those who loved reading, he substituted, for the works of chivalry or the hurtful novels of the day, the true romance and the celestial poetry of the Lives of the Saints. He set one of his disciples to write history against the heretics of that age; another to treat of the Notes of the Church; a third, to undertake the Martyrs and Christian Antiquities;—for, while in the discourses and devotions of the Oratory, he prescribed the simplicity of the primitive monks, he wished his children, individually and in private, to cultivate all their gifts to the full. He, however, was, after all and in all, their true model,—the humble priest, shrinking from every kind of dignity, or post, or office, and living the greater part of day and night in prayer, in his room or upon the housetop.
And when he died, a continued stream of people, says his biographer, came to see his body, during the two days that it remained in the church, kissing his bier, touching him with their rosaries or their rings, or taking away portions of his hair, or the flowers which were strewed over him; and, among the crowd, persons of every rank and condition were heard lamenting and extolling one who was so lowly, yet so great; who had been so variously endowed, and had been the pupil of so many saintly masters; who had the breadth of view of St. Dominic, the poetry of St. Benedict, the wisdom of St. Ignatius, and all recommended by an unassuming grace and a winning tenderness which were his own.
Savonarola is one of the great figures of the Renaissance, one whom secular figures cannot help but laud for his convictions and his manliness in defending them. Neri comes to us as a rather weaker figure, meeting sinners where they are, and attempting to work out their salvation mano a mano in the confessional rather than decrying these sinners from the pulpit. Savonarola will be described in any worthwhile history of Florence in her greatest period, while Neri will be left as a footnote at best.
Yet Savonarola’s role ends there. He stood as a pillar of orthodoxy, but orthodoxy already has a pillar in the Magisterium. Like all wisdom, it is there, though weakened mankind perpetually needs reminders to refer to it. He provides a historical curiosity, which is all the secular historian cares about anyway. But St. Philip was a true tool of conversion, the work which operates underneath the hubbub of secular history and is ultimately made clear in Eternity. For this reason, St. Philip is raised to the glory of the altars of the Church, or those who can recognize the eternal struggle against the temporal one, the Everlasting Light against the world’s flame.
It is tempting and easy to refer to the work of Savonarola, because it is easy to decry sin, and very difficult to convert sinners. In rereading St. Cardinal Newman’s passage, I was reminded of a photo taken by Cardinal Cupich (though I think he was merely Archbishop of Chicago at the time) of that Nebraskan hearing confession of a hispanic man in hoodie. There is an aesthetic disconnect between priestly vestments and the plastic garb of the mass democracy, but it is one that we ought to properly embrace rather than criticize on the terms of secular fashion. This is, speaking most charitably, the “Spirit of Vatican II,” as the proponents of the Second Vatican Council would hold.
The problem with this mindset is that there is no refuge, as St. Philip was able to offer, no Oratory of Sacred Music against the pornographic swill of our present day, no pilgrimage to the Seven Basilicas against the Cayman Islands trip which now serves as the ideal of recreation. The good of Vatican II was the desire to reform a missionary Church. The evil of Vatican II was failing to recognize that the Church must form some kind of refuge against the world—a refuge of which hard moralists like Savonarola and the modern traditionalists are well versed.
In the early days of the Pontificate of our new Holy Father, Pope Leo the Fourteenth, we should pray that this one salve of that destructive counsel can stay alive (and which his predecessor Pope Francis perceived and acted on until his death), while also hoping that his heart may be opened to the need for divorcing the Church from the world, for creating a refuge apart from it, all while never spurning those erstwhile residents of the City of Man. This requires an intellectual enlightenment, a reassessment of the foul state in which the world lies, all while never deviating from the missionary spirit of St. Philip Neri, who certainly would never spurn a man in a hoodie.
St. Philip, ora pro nobis.
