Philip Neri lived in the 1500s, and specialized in finding and rooting out sin in individuals. He strongly believed that repentance was far too often of a surface variety, and so he attended to helping sinners to dig out every trace of sin from within them. Butler writes colorfully of Philip Neri’s philosophy of addressing sin:

[T]he cancer (of sins) must be entirely extirpated with every string of its root; the least fibre left behind will push forth again, and with more vigour than before. Here the penitent must not spare himself, whatever it costs him; though he part with an eye or a foot. It is by the neglect of this precaution that so many conversions are false and counterfeit; and that relapses are so frequent. Our skillful director was careful to lay the axe to the root; and not content to draw souls out of Sodom, he obliged them to quit the neighbourhood, and fly to the mountains, to the greatest distance from the danger.

OK, so our saint was committed to performing radical sin-ectomies and was merciless in the requirements that he placed upon penitents, which Butler explained as Neri’s “thirst for the salvation of souls.”

Yet Philip Neri was not merely an excellent spiritual surgeon–he had a very specific gift in terms of the diagnoses of sins: he could actually smell the specific sins in which those who came before him were engaged! Yes, you read this correctly–Neri’s nose was capable of identifying varieties of sin. Butler writes of this gift that Neri “in particular knew hidden sins of impurity by the stench which such sinners exhaled”!! Not surprisingly, this made Neri very well known that not always popular.

Imagine–the idea that you could identify a person’s sins by her or his breath! Or, conversely, that someone could know YOUR sins by your breath! Granted, I’ve certainly smelled alcohol emanating from various persons, but Neri’s gift seem to have gone well beyond identification based on what the putative sinner had eaten or drunk.

So.. what do you think? Would you invite Philip to a dinner party? Would you seek his help to get over something is dragging your life down? Could you ever relax around someone with a nose like that? Is there a better question to ponder here?