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Pauline von Mallinckrodt was born on 3 June 1817 in Minden, Westphalia, then part of the Kingdom of Prussia. Her father, Detmar von Mallinckrodt, was a Lutheran nobleman and Prussian civil servant; her mother, Bernhardine von Hartmann, was Catholic. Pauline was baptized in the Catholic Church and raised in her mother's faith in a mixed-confession household of the Westphalian nobility. The family later lived in Aachen, where her father held high administrative office. After her mother's death in 1834, Pauline, still in her teens, took charge of the household and helped raise her younger siblings, among them Hermann von Mallinckrodt, who became a prominent Catholic parliamentarian in Prussia. She received a careful education and, through the Catholic revival then underway in the German lands, formed a strong interior life and a resolve to serve the poor and neglected.

From the 1840s she devoted herself to charitable work centered on Paderborn, especially the care of neglected children and the education of the blind, who then had few institutions in the region. She opened a school for blind children and gathered companions who wished to share a common religious life. With the support of Bishop Franz Drepper of Paderborn she founded, in 1849, the Congregation of the Sisters of Christian Charity, also known as the Daughters of the Blessed Virgin Mary of the Immaculate Conception. The community united devotion to the Immaculate Conception with an active apostolate of teaching, care of the blind, and other works of mercy. Pauline became the first superior general, shaped the constitutions, and directed the novitiate and the early foundations of the institute, which received diocesan approval and later papal recognition.

Under her leadership the congregation expanded across German-speaking lands, opening schools, orphanages, and houses for the blind. In the 1870s the Kulturkampf, the Prussian state's campaign of restrictive legislation against the Catholic Church, struck teaching orders with particular force and compelled many of her sisters to leave their houses in Prussia. Rather than allow the work to collapse, she directed the congregation toward foundations abroad, sending sisters to the United States beginning in 1873 and later to Chile and other parts of South America. She traveled extensively, including to Rome, to obtain papal support and to visit her communities, while keeping the motherhouse associated with Paderborn through the years of political pressure.

Pauline von Mallinckrodt died in Paderborn on 30 April 1881 and was buried at the motherhouse of her congregation. Pope John Paul II beatified her on 14 April 1985. Her liturgical memorial is observed on 30 April. The Sisters of Christian Charity continue educational and charitable work in Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere, and honor her as their foundress and as a model of apostolic religious life.

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