In "Holy Wit", we draw inspiration from the unique charism of St. Philip Neri (1515-1595), one of the four patron saints of the blog (alongside Sts. Benedict, Maximilian Kolbe and, most preeminently, Joseph the Worker). Neri's charism is capacious that it similarly includes all who came in contact with him both in the course of his life and in the generations that followed.

This group includes the good bishop St. Francis de Sales in addition to the prodigious church historian Cesare Baronius as well as luminaries such as John Henry Newman and Frederick William Faber the hymnodist (both also of the Oratory).  It encompassed St. Ignatius of Loyola (a good friend and founder of the largest religious order), St. Charles Borromeo (a great reformer of the Roman Church), in addition to St. Alphonsus Liguori ("Prince of moral theologians"), who participated as a youth in the "little oratory" of Neri's line, as well as the great musician Palestrina and the architect Gaudi who were active lay members.

This "joyful saint" known colloquially as "Good little Phil" by lay members was a man who firmly believed that the promises of Christ were in fact so uplifting that every waking moment was an excuse to share the "Good News" in his own little way with every single person he came in contact with.

As more an icon than a man, he was just as easy to spot him walking and chatting casually on the streets as he was standing (and even levitating) prominently upon the high altar.  He was a cheerful eccentric, it has been said, but a kind of modern archetype of holiness: a spiritual master underneath the appearance of a "holy fool."

Known for his playful sense of wit and deep love for silence and a love for the Holy Eucharist, this "Third Apostle of Rome" (after Sts. Peter and Paul) left an outsized impact upon the working out of a true Christian humanism from the troubled onstart of the modern world and its love of earthly vanities.

It is the basis of Neri's applied anthropology to the worldlings in his "spiritual exercises" and the rudiments of Christian cultivation that interest us.  Ranging from questions of eloquence and its place in upholding and propagating convictions, to Scriptural study illuminated by the lives of the saints and the edifying history of the Church, to the art of meditation and musical appreciation as material for everyday enrichment, we extract much food for thought from this founding saint of the Oratory.

In this blog, I provide a kind of blue print for a fellowship of isolated men, whether single, discerning vocation or marriage, or fathers and family men who are trying to build up their domestic church.  This blue print is a collection of spiritual exercises advocated by the Saint for the sake of laymen in particular.  Neri believed in "poco a poco" (as the Franciscan Father Mark Mary recently put it), which means "little by little."  It is better to do a small amount of spiritual exercise over a long period, both consistently and faithfully, then a lot of exhausting devotions, readings, prayers, fasting or what have you that deplete your energies and then discourage you once you drop them entirely.  

No, what goes for exercises for the body also goes for exercises of the mind and spirit.

Modesty in our expectations.  Fortitude in our commitments.  Prudence in our adjustments.  That is the game plan of the "Joyful Saint."

But first, dear reader, a call to humility:

"Let us aim for joy, rather than respectability", St. Philip once wrote. "Let us make fools of ourselves from time to time, and thus see ourselves, for a moment, as the all-wise God sees us." 

St. Philip Neri, heart inflamed by the Pentecost of the Holy Ghost, Ora pro nobis.