Saintly Clown

Early one morning this week (351 years ago), a slight old man with skin like alabaster and a beard like carded wool sat on his bed, raised his blue eyes to heaven and died. Cardinals had sought his blessing, popes had humored his whims and solicited his advice. Yet Philip Neri was neither a mighty prince of the church nor a hair-shirt hermit of the desert. He was a saint.

Philip Neri, whose delight it was "to play the fool for the love of God," managed to be both saint and humorist--to what degree is made plain in Theodore Maynard's new biography, Mystic in Motley (Bruce Publishing Co., $2.50). Biographer Maynard contributes nothing essentially new, is content in his popularization merely to introduce to modern Americans cue of the most unexpected personalities in Catholic hagiology.

Philip's saintliness lay in his utter simplicity (he consistently refused papal offers of a cardinalate), his overwhelming love which inspired many of Rome's bright young men to enter the church, and the mystic fervor with which he communed with God (it was difficult for him to say mass without being transfixed by ecstasy). His humor lay in the bizarre penances he exacted at confession and the outlandish antics with which he humbled his own pride.

All Rome loved him and laughed at him. He received exalted personages with his clothes turned inside out. He danced alone through the streets with his beard half shaved off, or strutted about carrying a huge bunch of broom which he pretended to sniff delightedly. Sometimes, in token of his humility, he would appear in public with a large blue cushion perched upon his head.

"On feast days," says Maynard, "he was quite likely to show himself in church with a jacket over his cassock and his biretta cocked on one side and with a lay-brother who had been told to keep brushing him off."

Philip Neri was a saint after Italy's heart. When his canonization was announced at the same time as that of Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier, Isidore the Farmer, and Teresa of Avila, the Spanish-hating gagsters of Rome wisecracked that the Pope had just canonized "four Spaniards and a saint."

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