St. Philip

Who they were

Philip of Bethsaida is the Gospels' great asker. Called directly, his first act is finding Nathanael with an invitation that is also a method: come and see. At the feeding of the five thousand, Jesus tests him with the arithmetic and Philip answers with an accountant's honest despair, that two hundred days' wages would not buy enough. When Greeks arrive wanting to see Jesus, it is Philip they approach.

And at the Last Supper he asks the question every praying person eventually asks: Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us. The answer he receives is one of the most important sentences in the Gospels. Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. Tradition takes his later preaching to Phrygia and gives him a martyr's death at Hierapolis. The Church keeps his feast with James the Less, whose relics were enshrined with his in Rome.

Why people turn to St. Philip

Everyone whose prayer has a blunt question in it, with St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew, whom Philip himself recruited with come and see.

How to ask their intercession

His sentence, prayed as it stands: show us the Father, and it is enough. He did not get in trouble for asking.