Date: May 26, 2020 ()

Bible Text: First Reading ACTS 20:17-27; Gospel JN 17:1-11A |

Series:

So ardently did this fire of divine love affect Philip…that the beating of his heart broke two ribs.

“I earnestly bore witness for both Jews and Greeks to repentance before God and to faith in our Lord Jesus.” These words of Paul actually remind us of the Lord’s invitation we hear every Ash Wednesday: “Repent and believe in the gospel.” If we are to love the Lord in return, this is basically the principle that will guide us through: Repentance and Obedience.

Today we honor St. Philip Neri who also showed to us his version of responding to the love and goodness of the Lord. I like this expression: “So ardently did this fire of divine love affect Philip during the octave of Pentecost in his twenty-ninth year that the beating of his heart broke two ribs. It was a wound that never healed.” The wound that never healed looks to me like a memory of love that did not fade. St. Philip Neri spent the rest of his fifty years since falling in love with the Lord serving Him with intense joy and passion. After his studies under the guidance of the Augustinians, he began to labor among the sick and the poor; ministered to the prostitutes of the city; sought opportunities of entering into conversation with people about the important teachings of the church, which in later life gained him the title of “Apostle of Rome.” One of his great acquaintances was Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus.

Philip, together with his confessor, founded the Confraternity of the Most Holy Trinity of Pilgrims and Convalescents that ministered to the needs of thousands of poor pilgrims to Rome and to the patients who were still too weak to labor after being discharged from the hospitals. They had a great devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, praying before It in a forty-hour exposition.

Joy and gaiety were so much a part of his normal disposition that Goethe, who esteemed him highly, called him the "humorous saint." We too can have our own version of loving the Lord following the same tenets of “repentance and obedience”.