Paul of the Cross

Paul of the Cross was born Paolo Francesco Danei on 3 January 1694 in Ovada, a town then belonging to the Republic of Genoa in northwestern Italy. He was the second of sixteen children of Luca Danei, a merchant of limited means, and Anna Maria Massari. The family later lived at Castellazzo Bormida. Formed in a devout Catholic home, he received a simple education and from youth showed a marked attraction to prayer, fasting, and works of mercy. Around 1715 he joined a Venetian military levy intended for service against the Ottoman Turks, but he left the army within about a year after a decisive interior conversion. He thereafter declined both marriage and a comfortable secular career. In 1720, following a lengthy retreat at Castellazzo, he wrote the first rule of a community whose members would wear a black habit marked with the emblems of the Passion and would dedicate their lives to meditating on, and preaching, the sufferings of Jesus Christ. He regarded this project as confirmed by interior graces and by a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary clothed in that same habit.

With his brother Giovanni Battista Danei he traveled to Rome, where Pope Benedict XIII ordained both men to the priesthood on 7 June 1727 and encouraged their apostolate. They lived for a time as hermits and itinerant preachers and in the 1730s established the first stable Passionist retreat on Monte Argentario on the Tuscan coast. Pope Benedict XIV approved their rule in 1741. The Congregation of the Passion of Jesus Christ expanded only gradually, constrained by extreme poverty, the austerity of the observance, and occasional episcopal or popular opposition. Paul served as the congregation’s first superior general, forming its members and repeatedly revising its constitutions. For much of the mid-eighteenth century he conducted parish missions across the Papal States and adjacent regions of Italy, drawing large audiences by a preaching style centered on the Crucifixion. Contemporaries esteemed him as a mystic, a confessor, and a reputed wonder-worker; his letters reveal long trials of spiritual darkness as well as experiences of union with God. In 1771 he founded a contemplative institute of Passionist nuns at Corneto, later Tarquinia, with Mother Mary Crucified Costantini as its first superior.

In 1773 Pope Clement XIV granted the Passionists the ancient basilica and adjoining monastery of Saints John and Paul on the Caelian Hill in Rome. Paul spent his last years in that house, continuing to govern the congregation despite chronic illness. He died there on 18 October 1775. Pope Pius IX beatified him in 1853 and canonized him on 29 June 1867. His body is enshrined in the Basilica of Saints John and Paul in Rome. The General Roman Calendar keeps his feast on 19 October.

Paul left no systematic theological treatise, but hundreds of letters of spiritual direction survive, together with the Passionist rule and notes from his retreats. His teaching held that continual remembrance of the Passion is the surest path to conversion and to growth in love of God and neighbor, and that interior purification often takes the form of sharing Christ’s abandonment on the Cross. Devotion to him has remained especially lively in Ovada and in Passionist communities throughout the world. The congregation he founded continues to work in preaching, spiritual exercises, and ministry among the afflicted, which he understood as a living memorial of the sufferings of Christ.