Saint Philip Neri calls a teenager back to life

For more than five centuries, every 16th March, the Palazzo Massimo in Via Corso Vittorio in Rome has been open to the faithful for this one day only, to attend the mass commemorating the extraordinary miracle performed by Saint Philip Neri in 1583, in the very room where it occurred: the momentary resurrection of Paolo Fabrizio Massimo, one of the sons of this noble family, just long enough for the teenager to go to confession.

Les raisons d'y croire :

• Today, it is fashionable to cast doubt on the miracles of resurrection performed by certain saints, claiming that in the past, medicine was incapable of providing certainty of death and that the so-called deceased were in a state of apparent death or in a coma. However, there seems to be no doubt that Paolo Massimo returned to life: ill for two and a half months, this boy of around fifteen was in agony at the beginning of March, and his death, on the morning of 16 March 1583, was expected. Neither his family nor the doctors had any doubt that he had given up the ghost, and it was to a house in mourning, resounding with sobs, that Fr. Philip Neri arrived around noon, after Paolo had sent for him in the early morning to make his last confession, since Neri was his spiritual director.

• The Massimos deplored the fact that Philip Neri, who was considered a miracle-working saint during his lifetime, had not arrived earlier, believing that he would have prevented the teenager's death. Curiously, the saint, who was attached to Paolo and very concerned about the salvation of souls, especially those of young people exposed to peril and temptation, did not seem overly distressed that he had not been there to give him absolution.

• This story is reminiscent of the resurrection of Lazarus, where Christ seemed to arrive too late to save his friend, but was about to perform a greater miracle, proving, just a few days before his Passion, that he is the master of life and death.

• Arriving in the room where the lifeless Paolo was lying, Philip Neri prayed briefly, then cried out: "Paolo, wake up!" Immediately, the teenager came back to life and spoke normally, confessing his sins as he had wished to do.

• Even if we assumed that Paolo Massimo wasn't clinically dead, it is astonishing that Neri managed to rouse someone from a deep coma with a single word, and that when he woke up, the person had full intellectual capacity.

• The young man remembered perfectly the experience he had just had on the other side, being reunited with his dead mother and one of his sisters, also dead, whom he loved very much. He remembered talking to both of them and also what they said to each other. Paolo would have liked to have stayed with them, freed from the suffering he had endured for weeks, but not having been able to confess condemned him to spend time in purgatory instead of going straight to heaven - which is why, at Neri's call, he came back to life.

• During his long illness, Paolo, who was suffering greatly, never asked his spiritual father for the grace of healing, even though Philip Neri was known for working miracles of healing, with sometimes the sick simply touching a piece of cloth belonging to Neri and being healed. Paolo's return to life was not a gratuitous miracle, however great, but a "miracle of respite" - i.e a momentary return to the life of this world, for the sake of receiving baptism or absolution. Its purpose is not to obtain a temporal reprieve, but to ensure eternal life.

• This is what Philip Neri was asking the young man: did he want, once cured, to resume his former life, without knowing what it would be like, with the spiritual perils he would surely encounter, or did he prefer to immediately go back to sleep in death with the guarantee of going to heaven? Neri knew that, through Christ who acted through him as a priest, he could give the boy a choice. Paolo chose eternal life; a few minutes later he went back to sleep, definitively, even though he seemed to have been cured.

• This happened during the Renaissance period, when the spirit of faith was being lost. Such a resounding miracle attracted attention that was not always kind. We can therefore be sure that this event, like the many other prodigies in Neri's life, was subjected to critical scrutiny. These phenomena were so numerous and so astonishing - incendium amoris, ecstasies, levitations, prophecy, visions, bilocations, soul-reading, discernment, etc. - that they were almost disturbing in an age that was beginning to claim to be rational and scientific. Yet they were all ratified and included in his Bull of Canonisation in 1622, less than thirty years after Neri's death on 26 May 1595 - a remarkably short time for that era.

• Neri's first biographer, Father Bacci, and Father Gallonio, his disciple and friend, testified under oath to the veracity of their statements and events.

• Neri's close friendships with the greatest saints of his time - Sts. Charles Borromeo, Ignatius of Loyola and Camillus de Lellis, whose confessor he was - prove the veracity of his charisms, as these saints would certainly have denounced an impostor.

• The mass commemorating the "great miracle of Saint Philip Neri" was abolished for a time in the 1970s, but was reinstated under John Paul II, which would not have been the case if the Church had had any doubts about its veracity. It is still celebrated today.