Saint Paul of the Cross (1694-1775)

Birth at Ovada (1694) and the Danei family

Paul Francis Danei was born on January 3, 1694 at Ovada, a small town then attached to the Republic of Genoa, on the borders of Piedmont and Liguria.^[5][6] His parents, Luca Danei and Anna Maria Massari, were small merchants and deeply Christian; the Catholic Encyclopedia calls them "exemplary Catholics."^[7] Paul was the second of sixteen children, of whom only six survived early childhood — a common trial of families of the time, which made the child familiar very early with death and suffering.^[8]

His mother, above all, imprinted devotion to the Passion upon her son. In his old age, Paul would confess the debt he owed her:

"If I am saved, as I hope through the mercy of God, it will be owing to my mother's training." — Saint Paul of the Cross^[9]

According to tradition, when he cried as a child, his mother would show him a crucifix to console him: the Cross was the first alphabet of his heart.

Castellazzo, the shop and the conversion

The family settled at Castellazzo, near Alessandria, where Luca ran a trade in tobacco and cloth. Paul received his first schooling from a priest who kept a boys' school at Cremolino in Lombardy, where he distinguished himself as much by piety as by study; he heard Mass every day, frequented the sacraments and nourished his soul with good books.^[10] At fifteen he left school and returned to work in his father's shop.^[11]

At about nineteen, reading the Treatise on the Love of God by Saint Francis de Sales and the influence of Capuchin priests brought about a true interior conversion in him.^[12] He would later recount that Christ enkindled in his heart a twofold hunger that would never be extinguished:

"In those first years, our Lord filled me with hunger for two things: for Holy Communion and for suffering." — Saint Paul of the Cross^[13]

From then on, the young man multiplied penances, long periods of prayer and visits to churches; the thriving merchant felt called to total stripping.

The sword laid down: enlistment in 1715

In 1714-1715, moved by a call to crusade against the Turks issued in favor of Venice, Paul enlisted in the army to defend Christendom.^[14][15] But a prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, in a church at Cremona, made him understand that God was waiting for him elsewhere: he left the militia and returned home. Shortly after, he refused an advantageous marriage and renounced the inheritance of a priest uncle, keeping only the breviary — the first sign of the radical choice of evangelical poverty.^[16][17]

The graces of Castellazzo

The year 1720 was decisive. In the course of several mystical graces, Paul saw himself clothed in a long black tunic, marked on the breast with a white heart surmounted by a cross, bearing the name of Jesus and the inscription of his Passion. He understood that he must found a company of poor men devoted to keeping alive the memory of the Passion and preaching it to men.^[18][19]

His bishop, Msgr. Francesco Arborio di Gattinara, Bishop of Alessandria, discerned the authenticity of this call. He clothed Paul in the black habit and allowed him to withdraw to write the Rule of the nascent institute — the founding gesture which the Church would retain as the true birth of the Passionists.^[20][21]

The Rule written in forty days

From November 22 to January 1, 1720-1721, Paul shut himself in a bare cell adjoining the sacristy of the church of St. Charles at Castellazzo, for a retreat of forty days.^[22][23] It was there that he set down in writing the Rule of the future Congregation of the Passion. The sources note that he drafted the text himself in only five days — but that the years separating this drafting from pontifical approbation would be "long and heavy with trials."^[24]

The Rule was of extreme austerity: rigorous poverty, solitude, fasting, bare feet, long hours of nocturnal prayer, and above all a fourth vow proper to the institute — to promote remembrance of the Passion of Christ among the faithful. It is this central intuition which would always distinguish the Passionists from other religious families.^[25][26]

The spiritual diary

During that same retreat, Paul kept a spiritual diary (the Diario spirituale), one of the rare documents in which one can read from within the soul of a twenty-six-year-old young mystic: alternating burning consolations and dryness, desire to suffer with the Crucified, total abandonment to the divine will. This notebook, preserved and published, remains a major primary source for understanding the origin of his vocation.^[27]

Ordination by Benedict XIII (1727)

Paul and his younger brother John Baptist traveled to Rome to obtain approbation for their plan. Turned away at first, they settled for a time at the Hospital of San Gallicano, where they nursed the incurably ill while deepening their theological formation.^[28][29] It was there that Pope Benedict XIII, having recognized their worth, ordained them priests on June 7, 1727, in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.^[30]

The first popular missions

Now a priest, Paul threw himself into preaching popular missions. His word, stripped of learned ornament, struck by its burning simplicity and realism: he showed the suffering Christ, made his hearers touch the malice of sin and the tenderness of crucified love. He walked barefoot through villages, slept on hard ground, begged his bread, and everywhere his passing left resounding conversions.^[31][32]

The foundation of Monte Argentario (1737)

After years of precariousness and waiting, Paul finally obtained leave to found his first stable community. On September 14, 1737, on the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, he opened the "Retreat of the Presentation" on Monte Argentario, a wild promontory on the Tuscan coast, in the province of Grosseto.^[33][34] The place, isolated between sea and mountain, embodies the Passionist ideal: contemplative solitude and closeness to the poor populations of the Maremma.

It was there that, on April 10, 1747, the first general chapter of the institute was held, in the course of which Paul was, against his will, unanimously elected first superior general — an office he would keep until his death.^[35][36]

Brother John Baptist, the other founder

Paul's work is inseparable from that of his brother John Baptist Danei (in religion Giovanni Battista di San Michele Arcangelo, April 4, 1695 – August 30, 1765).^[37] Paul's companion since childhood, he shared the vision, pronounced the first vows with him, and became the spiritual director and the first general consultor of the nascent congregation. A more contemplative mind and a steadier theologian than his elder brother, he was the hidden soul of the difficult foundations. His death in 1765 would be one of Paul's greatest sorrows, for he venerated him as a saint; his own cause was introduced, and today he bears the title of Venerable.^[38]

The Roman approbations (1741-1769)

The canonical recognition of the institute was slow, in keeping with the austerity of its Rule, at first judged too harsh. It advanced step by step under three pontificates:

The bull Supremi Apostolatus of November 16, 1769, by which Clement XIV definitively confirmed the Rule and granted the congregation all the privileges of the other orders, marks the full establishment of the Passionists in the Church.^[39] A few weeks before Paul's death, Pius VI added the solemn confirmation of the bull Praeclara virtutum exempla of September 15, 1775: the old founder could die seeing his work fully secured.^[40]

The Passionist Nuns (1771)

Paul dreamed of a contemplative, purely cloistered branch which would carry in prayer the mission of preaching the Passion. On May 3, 1771, at Corneto (today Tarquinia), the first monastery of the Passionist Nuns opened: the first superior, Mother Mary Crucified (Faustina Costantini, 1713-1787), and nine companions took the black habit and pronounced, besides the vows of poverty, chastity, obedience and enclosure, the fourth vow of promoting devotion to the Passion.^[41] The contemplative order thus doubled the active order, under the single charism of the Cross.

A word of fire

For nearly half a century, Paul of the Cross crisscrossed central Italy — the Papal States, Tuscany, and above all the Maremma, a coastal region made unhealthy by malaria and religious neglect. He is credited with hundreds of missions preached. His preaching was no exercise in eloquence: it was a plunge into the mystery of Calvary, in which he made whole crowds weep by showing them the mocked love of the Crucified. Many hold him to be one of the greatest missionary preachers of 18th-century Italy, comparable in influence to Saint Alphonsus Liguori in the Kingdom of Naples.^[42][43]

Charisms: prophecy, reading of hearts, miracles

The testimonies of his time, gathered during the canonization process, credit him with extraordinary mystical gifts: prophecy, reading of consciences (he discerned the hidden sins of penitents), ecstasies, bilocation and healings.^[44] The Catholic Encyclopedia sums up: "God had favored him with the gifts of prophecy and miracles."^[45] But Paul fled these sensible graces as much as he sought the Cross: he feared illusion and wanted, he said, "no other ladder to climb to heaven but the Cross of Jesus."

The mystic of the Passion stripped of all consolation

Beneath the untiring preacher lay hidden an interior abyss. From about 1725, and for nearly forty-five years, until about 1770, Paul of the Cross passed through a mystical night almost unique in length in the history of spirituality: dryness, darkness of the soul, a sense of abandonment, temptations against faith and hope, vicarious reparation offered for sinners.^[46] Where Saint John of the Cross described the dark night as a purifying passage, Paul lived it as an almost permanent state, scarcely ever recovering the sensible consolations of his early days.

"Pure love knows no self-interest: it seeks only the glory of the Beloved." — Saint Paul of the Cross^[47]

The longest night

That the master of crucified love should himself have carried, for decades, the weight of God's sensible absence gives his doctrine its authority: he did not teach an easy consolation, but naked fidelity in obscure faith. The view of historians of mysticism confirms the singular character of this trial: reporting a conversation with the historian Joachim Bouflet, René Laurentin notes that Paul, having reached transforming union very young even before the foundation, then passed through a new night which he no longer described as the night of the spirit, but as a "night of the Passion, accompanied by terrible temptations" — with the "naked suffering" (nudo patire), the sense of nothingness and a radical dereliction, to which he answered with a wild abandonment to the will of God.^[48]

It was in this night that he wrote most of his letters of direction — more than two thousand have been preserved — in which he guides souls with a sureness and tenderness which nothing, in himself, came to comfort.^[49][50]

"The most stupendous work of Divine Love"

Paul's whole message holds in a single intuition: the Passion of Jesus is the summit of the revelation of God's love, and remembering it — in the strong, biblical sense of a rekindled presence — transforms the soul.

"The Passion of Christ is the greatest and most stupendous work of Divine Love." — Saint Paul of the Cross^[51]

For him, forgetting the Passion is the root of all evils; remembering it with love is the shortest path to holiness. That is why he wanted his sons to keep "perpetual remembrance" of it through their fourth vow.^[52]

The sea of sorrows, the ocean of love

The image that returns ceaselessly under his pen is that of the ocean: the Passion is unfathomable, and the soul is invited to lose itself in it.

"The Passion of Jesus is a sea of sorrows, but it is also an ocean of love. Ask the Lord to teach you to fish in this ocean: dive into its depths; no matter how deep you go, you will never reach the bottom." — Saint Paul of the Cross^[53]

"All is to be found in the Passion of Jesus. Make every effort to remain hidden in the wounds of Jesus, and you will be enriched with every good and every true light." — Saint Paul of the Cross^[54]

Building an interior oratory

His pedagogy of prayer is concrete and burning. To a soul who complained of being unable to withdraw into solitude, he answered, in a letter of January 9, 1760:

"Build an oratory within yourself, and there keep Jesus on the altar of your heart. Speak to Him often as you go about your occupations." — Saint Paul of the Cross^[55]

Abandonment and nakedness of spirit

At the end of this path, Paul places total abandonment to the will of God and nakedness of spirit — the stripping away of all self-seeking, even in spiritual things.

"My Father, my Father, I am all Thine! O dear, O sweet will of God, I adore Thee!" — Saint Paul of the Cross^[56]

"All your faults, compared with divine goodness, are less than a bit of tattered thread thrown into a sea of fire." — Saint Paul of the Cross^[57]

This boundless trust in mercy, joined to the austerity of penance, brings Paul close to the great masters of trusting love of his century, and prepares from afar the spirituality of childhood of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux.

The last days in Rome

In 1773, Paul obtained for his religious the prestigious Basilica of Santi Giovanni e Paolo (SS. Giovanni e Paolo) on the Caelian Hill in Rome, which became the general house of the order. It was there, worn out by penances, illness and age, that he died peacefully on October 18, 1775, at eighty-one years of age.^[58][59] At his death, the congregation already counted about one hundred and eighty religious spread across twelve retreats.^[60] His body rests in the Basilica of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, which has become the great Passionist shrine.

Beatification (1852) and canonization (1867)

The canonization process, opened shortly after his death, brought to light the heroicity of his virtues and the solidity of his charisms. Pius IX beatified him on October 1, 1852, then canonized him on June 29, 1867, on the feast of Saints Peter and Paul.^[61][62] His liturgical feast is now fixed on October 19 (it stood on April 28 in the calendar prior to 1969).^[63]

Legacy: the Passionists today

The spiritual family born of the vision of 1720 has spread throughout the world. It has given the Church leading figures such as Saint Gemma Galgani, the Passionist stigmatist of Lucca, or Saint Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows, and has carried devotion to the Passion to the ends of the earth. Three centuries after the merchant of Castellazzo, Paul's intuition remains strikingly timely: in a world that flees suffering, it recalls that the Cross of Christ is not a defeat, but "the most stupendous work of Divine Love."

• Saint Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787) — Paul's contemporary, another great apostle of popular missions and of the spirituality of the Cross in 18th-century Italy.
• Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort (1673-1716) — itinerant missionary and spiritual master of the same Catholic revival.
• Saint John of the Cross — the doctor of the dark night, the key to understanding the long mystical night of Paul of the Cross.
• Saint Francis de Sales — his Treatise on the Love of God was the instrument of Paul's conversion.
• Saint Gemma Galgani — the great Passionist mystic, spiritual daughter of the charism of the Passion.
• Clement XIV (1705-1774) — the pope who definitively approved the Congregation of the Passion in 1769.