God's Un-Angry Mqn

Often the priest appeared in church to say Mass with some of his clothes turned inside out and his biretta askew. If there were finicky intellectuals present, he was likely to recite the liturgy in ungrammatical Latin. Sometimes he had his hair cut in church: once he turned up at the poshest party in Rome with a week's growth of beard on one side of his face. Yet he was a saint--respected by several Popes, visited by cardinals on his sickbed.

St. Philip Neri's motto was,"Siate umili, state bassi [Be humble, be lowly]," and one of his most frequent prayers was "Lord, don't trust Philip." This humility, combined with a joyful spirit and a pride-pricking sense of humor, brightened 16th century Rome, as it does a new biography, St. Philip Neri, by French Author Marcel Jouhandeau (Harper; $2.75).

Feet off the Ground. Philip was one of Rome's few fixtures in a turbulent time; during his 80 years there were no fewer than 15 Popes, most of them colorful and quirky.* The son of a notary, he was born in Florence in 1515, went to Rome at the age of 18, a strikingly attractive youth who kept his good looks all his life. A contemporary described him in old age "with hair as white as ermine; his skin is as delicate as a girl's. If he lifts his hand up and it happens to be against the sun it looks transparent, just like alabaster.'' Ordained at 35, he modestly resisted being made a cardinal. He was so chary of pomp and circumstance that he broke permanently with two of his favorite followers who did accept red hats.

Philip was a mystic so prone to ecstasy that sometimes his Masses would last for hours while he remained in trance. Levitation seemed to come easily to him, according to chroniclers of his time, and was a source of much embarrassment. He forestalled it wherever possible by cracking outrageous jokes: he even seized a Swiss guard's beard to keep him from taking off. One witness stated in his deposition at Philip's canonization process that he had seen the saint with his feet off the ground on innumerable occasions.

Jubilee Year. But Philip had little use for the manifestations of mysticism, including his own. Often he would break down weeping, but later he would belittle such outbursts by remarking that prostitutes shed buckets of tears on hearing of Christ's crucifixion without changing their way of life in the least.

The pious who came to him hoping for instruction in prayer and contemplation would usually find themselves turning mattresses for the sick in hospitals. One woman (he was not partial to women since one had tried to seduce him ) complained to Philip that she was covered with lice from her hospital work, and his response was to tell her to eat one of them. He loved to lead pilgrimages to Rome's seven basilicas, and they took on the quality of gay outings, complete with plenty of food and wine, in which nobles rubbed shoulders with peasants and workmen, and the saint's pet cat went along in a basket.

Philip's greatest achievement was what he called the Oratory. It started as a simple gathering of priests and laymen, meeting to pray, read and discuss spiritual matters. Gradually it grew into a full-fledged community, with its own church and chapter house and a program for giving food and shelter to pilgrims. During the Jubilee Year of 1575, according to contemporary accounts, the Oratory opened its doors to 144,913 visitors and served 365,132 meals. The musical form, oratorio, derives its name from Philip's community, where it was partly developed by Florentine Composer Giovanni Animuccia. Palestrina's successor as choir master at St. Peter's.

Philip Neri was literally bighearted. People often said that they could hear his heart hammering from far off, and his doctors noticed a swelling in his chest that they took to be a tumor. But after his death, an autopsy showed that his heart was so enlarged that it had sprung two of his ribs out of position. Few who knew him doubted his sainthood. Two months after he died, the canonization process began with 194 witnesses, and less than 27 years later, Pope Gregory XV proclaimed him St. Philip Neri. "He owed his pre-eminence," writes Author Jouhandeau, ''entirely to his irresistible power of attraction. That was what won over all his disciples. Once people had come to know him it was a kind of death for them to be made to do without him."

* Notably Sixtus V, a Franciscan famed for his rages, who in 1585 managed to get himself elected (legend has it) by pretending to be an invalid, thereby giving his rivals in the conclave the impression that he would not last long as Pope. As soon as the winning vote was counted, he picked up the stick over which he had been crouching and hurled it as far as he could, then began intoning the Te Deum so loudly that the Vatican is said to have trembled--not to mention the cardinals. He reigned for five years.

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