Saint Paul of the Cross

Saint Paul of the Cross was an Italian priest, mystic, and preacher, the founder of the Congregation of the Passion of Jesus Christ, whose members are known as Passionists. His liturgical memorial falls on October 19.

He was born on January 3, 1694, in the small town of Ovada in northern Italy as Paolo Francesco Danei. He was the eldest son in a family into which sixteen children were born. The family was of noble origin but struggled with material hardship, so he began early to help his father in his work. He grew up in Castellazzo, his father’s native place. In 1713 he went through a spiritual turning point and resolved to live in penance and prayer. Afterward he volunteered for the Venetian army, which was to fight the Turks, but he quickly understood that this was not his path.

In the summer of 1720, as he himself wrote, he saw himself in a black tunic with a white cross and the name of Jesus on the breast. He understood then that he was to found a congregation that would meditate on and proclaim the Passion of Christ. On November 22, 1720, the bishop of Alessandria clothed him in the black garment of a penitent. Immediately afterward Paul shut himself for forty days in a cell beside the Church of Saint Charles in Castellazzo, where he wrote the rule of the future community and kept a spiritual diary. His first companion was his younger brother John Baptist.

Pope Benedict XIII allowed him to gather companions, and on June 7, 1727, he himself ordained both brothers priests in Saint Peter’s Basilica. The brothers settled on Monte Argentario on the coast of Tuscany, where the first house of the congregation was opened in 1737. Benedict XIV approved the rule in 1741, and Clement XIV solemnly confirmed it in 1769. Paul led the congregation as superior general until his death.

For several decades he preached popular missions in the Papal States and in Tuscany, especially in the poor Maremma and on the islands of the Tuscan Archipelago. He spoke above all of the Passion of Jesus, which he called “the greatest and most overwhelming work of God’s love.” In the poor and the sick whom he served he saw the face of the crucified Christ. He left thousands of letters of spiritual counsel. John Paul II called him a great mystic and evangelizer of the eighteenth century.

In 1771 at Tarquinia, then called Corneto, he founded the first monastery of enclosed Passionist nuns. Two years later Clement XIV gave the Passionists the Basilica of Saints John and Paul on the Caelian Hill in Rome, together with the adjoining house, which to this day is the seat of the congregation’s government. There Paul of the Cross died on October 18, 1775, at the age of 81, and there he was buried.

Pope Pius IX beatified him on May 1, 1853, and declared him a saint on June 29, 1867. In 2020, three hundred years after the founder was clothed in the habit, the Passionists opened the jubilee of their congregation.