Edinburgh Oratory Project

What is an Oratory?

The origins of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri were in the lay apostolate which St Philip himself began, largely among the Florentine community in the city of Rome after his arrival there in 1533. The shape and charism of the institute had taken shape by 1552, when Philip began to collect a circle of men in his room at the Roman church of San Girolamo della Carità, having reluctantly agreed to be ordained to the priesthood on the advice of his spiritual director a year earlier.

In order to keep his circle of young men out of trouble during the afternoons, Philip occupied them with spiritual reading, edifying conversation, and pilgrimages to churches and convents. Visits to the sick and dying in hospitals were part of this apostolate. In the evenings, some of his penitents would return to him in his room at San Girolamo for more prayers. It was only when the group became too large to manage single-handed that he proposed that some of the original lay members should be ordained.

By 1558 Philip’s group had outgrown his own small room, and so a larger space over the church was adapted as an ‘oratory’ for their meetings, which began to take on the more definite form known as the ‘Exercises of the Oratory’. These ‘exercises’ consisted of mental prayer, informal commentary on spiritual readings, vocal prayers, and the singing of hymns and songs. In 1575 they acquired the church of Santa Maria in Vallicella, and the Congregation was canonically erected by Pope Gregory XIII. Its status was confirmed as a community of secular priests bound by charity, but not by vows. Members of the Oratory, therefore, remain secular clergy, rather than religious.

Before Philip’s death in 1595, the foundation of other Oratories in Italy was already underway. St Philip viewed these developments without enthusiasm and was insistent that any new foundations should be quite independent of the original Roman house. Today, 87 Oratorian Congregations exist in 19 countries across four continents. Each house operates autonomously under the supervision of the Confederation in Rome.