Talk:Oratory of Saint Philip Neri

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This site, especially this page (http://www.oratoriosanfilippo.org/costituzioni.html) could be quite useful in creating a fuller description of the Oratorian life. My Italian is not up to the Job of translating it.

The Oratorians, are, I gather, fairly independent and relatively democratic - each house having its own autonomy and all the full members of the community having voting rights on descisions - which once made, even the Provost must abide by even if he strongly disagrees with them. The constitution should allow someone to write a fuller and more accurate description of these issues.

Your points about the democratic nature of Oratorian houses is correct. I was a member of an Oratorian house for a time. The head of the house, the provost, is more or less a "first among equals" and is elected by all the priests and brothers in the house. Another aspect of Oratorian life that is distinct from most Catholic forms of religious life is that each member continues to own his own personal property and earn his own salary (as opposed to those under a vow of poverty who give up ownership of property, although they may still have the use of the property.) Each member contributes to the common expenses of the house voluntarily in proporation to his ability. The house also is typically supported by benefactors as well. CrazyElk 05:36, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

Adding globalize tag

I don't really understand this article. It states that the Congregation was founded by St Philip Neri sometime in the 16th century, but implies that the first actual Oratory wasn't founded until 1848. And it seems as if the congregation is now very much an English language entity, confined to the UK and North America.

I'm not sure whether this is true, in which case we need some sort of explanation as to what happened in the 250 years or so before 1848. Or whether the article is just grossly anglo-centric, and is completely ignoring a whole community of (possibly pre-1848) Oratories outside the English speaking world. I'm going to add the cleanup tag, as this clearly needs sorting out. -- Chris j wood (talk) 13:30, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Digging further, I found [1], which states that there are over 70 Oratories world-wide. Comparing this with the list in the article, I think it is now clear that we are dealing with the second option here; an anglo-centric article. So I've changed the cleanup tag to a more specific globalize one. -- Chris j wood (talk) 13:48, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

I've restructured the article to put the anglo-centric information in one section, and added cited info from the above reference to substantiate world-wide coverage. The new section (Oratories around the world) still needs the globalize tag, because it has no info from outside the UK/NA. I havn't managed to find this information, so it will have to stay that way for now, but at least the bias is now open, rather than covert and confusing. -- Chris j wood (talk) 14:12, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

The anglo-centric aspect of the article seems gone to me, so now the tag is too. PsychoInfiltrator (talk) 21:07, 28 May 2012 (UTC)