Saint Paul of the Cross: The Saint Who Kept Calvary Alive

Fr. Scott Haynes
5 days ago
8 min read

Fr. Scott Haynes

A Meditation for the Feast of. St. Paul of the Cross

April 28

Saint Paul of the Cross was born Paul Francis Danei at Ovada, near Genoa, on January 3, 1694, into a devout Catholic family. From his youth, the Crucified Christ seemed to stand before him not as an idea, but as a living Person. The old Catholic Encyclopedia says of him that “from his earliest years the crucifix was his book, and the Crucified his model.”¹ That sentence contains the whole secret of his life. Some saints are known for founding schools, writing theological works, converting nations, or defending doctrine in controversy. Paul’s mission was simpler and more terrible. He was raised up to keep the memory of the Passion of Jesus Christ burning in the Church.

As a young man, Paul did not immediately see the shape of his vocation. He once tried the life of a soldier, but the noise of arms could not satisfy a soul already being drawn toward Calvary. He renounced an honorable marriage and even refused an inheritance left to him by an uncle, keeping only that priest’s breviary.² It was as though Providence were stripping him, little by little, of every ordinary security, so that he might belong entirely to the Crucified. In 1720, while still a layman, he received the inspiration to found a new congregation devoted to the Passion of Christ. Clothed by his bishop in a black tunic, barefoot and bareheaded, he withdrew into a narrow cell and composed the Rule of the new institute. He later described the writing of that Rule in words that sound almost prophetic: “I began to write this holy rule on the second of December in the year 1720, and I finished it on the seventh of the same month.” He added that he wrote “as quickly as if somebody in a professor’s chair were there dictating to me,” and that he “felt the words come from my heart.”³

This was not the work of a romantic enthusiast. Paul did not imagine a soft religious life wrapped in religious sentiment. The Rule he gave to his sons was severe. The Passionists were to live in poverty, solitude, prayer, penance, silence, and apostolic labor. They were not to be comfortable preachers who spoke about the Cross from a safe distance. They were to carry the Cross into their own flesh, into their food, sleep, clothing, travel, and ministry. Their black habit, marked with the sign of the Passion, was itself a sermon. On the breast they bore the emblem of a heart, surmounted by a white cross, with the words Jesu XPI Passio—“the Passion of Jesus Christ.” The Passion was not merely their subject. It was their name, their clothing, their daily bread, their family inheritance.

Paul and his brother John Baptist were ordained priests by Pope Benedict XIII in the Vatican basilica on June 7, 1727. After serving for a time in the hospital of St. Gallicano, they withdrew to Mount Argentaro, where the first Passionist house took root in a small hermitage near a chapel dedicated to St. Anthony.⁴ There, in poverty and silence, the new congregation began. Three companions soon joined them, and the little band tried to live as men whose chief treasure was the Crucified Lord. They did not seek the favor of the powerful. They went especially to the poor, the forgotten, and the spiritually abandoned, preaching parish missions and calling sinners to repentance through the wounds of Christ.

Paul understood poverty not as a decorative virtue, but as a hard school of compassion. It meant hunger, vermin, cold, exhaustion, foul water, worn clothing, rough roads, sickness, and uncertainty. It meant living close enough to the poor to smell their misery and hear the bitterness that misery can carve into the human voice. Poverty is not only an empty purse. It can be the slow humiliation of never being alone, never being rested, never being clean, never having enough light, medicine, food, or hope. Paul wanted his missionaries to stand there, not above the poor but among them, so that when they preached Christ crucified, their words would not sound like theater. They would speak as men who knew, in their own bodies, something of the pressure of the Cross.

Not everyone could bear such a vocation. Many novices came, admired the ideal, and then left when they discovered what it cost. This is often the way with saints. From a distance their lives seem beautiful, but up close one sees the bed of boards, the hidden tears, the obedience that breaks self-will, the prayer that continues when consolation disappears. Paul was not founding an association of religious poets. He was founding an army of penitents, confessors, mission preachers, and contemplatives of Calvary. Even the Holy See, while recognizing the work, required that the Rule be moderated. Benedict XIV approved the Rule in 1741, reportedly saying that the Congregation of the Passion had come into the world last, though it ought to have come first. Full approval followed under Clement XIV in 1769.⁵

The theological center of Paul’s life was the conviction that the Passion is not a tragic episode to be remembered once a year during Holy Week. It is the supreme revelation of divine charity. Paul said, “The Passion is the most stupendous work of the love of God.”⁶ He also warned, with piercing clarity, that “forgetting the Passion of Jesus is the cause of a great many evils in this world.”⁷ This is a deeply Catholic insight. When men forget the Cross, suffering becomes meaningless, sin becomes harmless, comfort becomes an idol, and the poor become inconvenient. But when the Cross is remembered, everything changes. Suffering can be united to Christ. Sin is seen in its terrible cost. Mercy is seen not as a vague kindness, but as Blood poured out. The poor are no longer refuse at the edge of society, but living icons of the Man of Sorrows.

The Fathers of the Church had long taught this same wisdom. Saint Augustine wrote that “the true teacher of humility is Christ, who humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.”⁸ Saint Leo the Great taught that through the Cross “the faithful receive strength from weakness, glory from dishonour, life from death.”⁹ Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, speaking of the virtues, asked: “Where true fortitude, but in the Passion of Christ?”¹⁰ Paul of the Cross took this patristic theology and made it a way of life. He preached as though Augustine, Leo, Bernard, and the Apostle Paul had all led him to one place: the foot of the Cross, beside Mary, where the soul learns the deepest grammar of love.

His preaching was powerful because it was not merely eloquent. It was soaked in prayer. Paul spent long hours before the Blessed Sacrament. He practiced severe mortifications. He loved silence. He guided souls with fatherly firmness, and his missions produced many conversions. The Catholic Encyclopedia says that “sacred missions were instituted and numerous conversions were made,” and that he was “untiring in his Apostolic labours.”¹¹ He became known as a master of retreats, a director of souls, and a preacher whose words could melt hardened hearts. The Passionists after him would inherit this same apostolic character: they were to awaken the memory of Christ’s Passion in the faithful, especially among those whose lives had become spiritually dull, morally wounded, or crushed by misery.

Paul’s spirituality can seem severe to modern ears, but it was not gloomy. He was not in love with suffering for its own sake. He was in love with Christ, and because Christ had suffered, Paul wanted to be near Him there. There is a great difference between morbid austerity and crucified love. Paul’s penances were the language of a heart that wanted to belong entirely to Jesus. As years passed, fasting, poverty, prayer, and mortification became less like burdens imposed from outside and more like the rhythm of his soul. He had discovered the paradox known to many saints: when sacrifice is embraced out of love, it can become strangely light. The Cross remains the Cross, but love changes the way it is carried.

He also founded a congregation of contemplative nuns devoted to the Passion. This had been in his mind from the beginning, but it came to fulfillment near the end of his life through the cooperation of Mother Mary of Jesus Crucified, born Faustina Gertrude Costantini. The Rule for the Passionist nuns was approved in 1770.¹² This is significant. Paul knew that preaching alone was not enough. The apostolic word must be supported by hidden prayer. The missionary who thunders from the pulpit needs the cloistered soul who keeps watch in silence. Calvary itself teaches this: beneath the public agony of Christ there stands the silent, contemplative heart of Mary.

One of Paul’s great desires was the return of England to the Catholic faith. He did not see that hope fulfilled in his lifetime, but Providence later allowed one of his sons to become an instrument of grace in England. Blessed Dominic Barberi, a Passionist priest, received Saint John Henry Newman into the Catholic Church in 1845. This was not an accidental ornament in Passionist history. It showed that Paul’s charism had power beyond Italy, beyond popular missions, beyond the poor villages he loved. The memory of the Passion could touch scholars as well as peasants, converts as well as cradle Catholics, nations as well as individuals.

In his old age, Paul gained a reputation for holiness, prophecy, healing, and miracles. Yet his greatest miracle was the congregation he left behind: a family of priests, brothers, and nuns whose mission was to say to the Church in every generation, “Do not forget what Love has suffered for you.” He died in Rome on October 18, 1775, worn out by austerity, labor, and age. He was canonized by Blessed Pius IX in 1867.¹³

Saint Paul of the Cross is a needed saint for every age, but perhaps especially for an age that flees pain, hides death, sanitizes poverty, and treats comfort as a right. He teaches that the Passion of Christ is not only a devotion. It is a school of reality. There we learn what sin is, what love costs, what mercy gives, and what holiness requires. There the proud become humble, the despairing find hope, the poor discover a Brother, and the priest learns how to preach not himself, but Jesus Christ crucified.

Saint Paul of the Cross, preacher of Calvary, teach us to keep the Passion of Jesus alive in our minds and hearts. Obtain for priests the grace to preach with courage, for religious the grace to live their vows with joy, for the poor the consolation of Christ’s nearness, and for all the faithful the grace never to forget the wounds by which we have been healed.

Footnotes

¹ Arthur Devine, “St. Paul of the Cross,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 11 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911), New Advent, https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11590a.htm. (New Advent)

² Devine, “St. Paul of the Cross.” (New Advent)

³ Arthur Devine, “Passionists,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 11 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911), New Advent, https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11521d.htm. (New Advent)

⁴ Devine, “Passionists.” (New Advent)

⁵ Devine, “Passionists.” (New Advent)

⁶ “Living the Passion of Christ: The Memory of the Passion in Latin America,” Congregation of the Passion of Jesus Christ, PDF, https://www.passiochristi.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/23_LIVING-THE-PASSION-OF-CHRIST_The-Memory-of-the-Passion-in-Latin-America.pdf. (PASSIOCHRISTI)

⁷ “Living the Passion of Christ,” Congregation of the Passion of Jesus Christ. (PASSIOCHRISTI)

⁸ Augustine, Tractate 51 on the Gospel of John, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, vol. 7, trans. John Gibb, New Advent, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1701051.htm. (New Advent)

⁹ Leo the Great, Sermon 55: On the Lord’s Passion, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. 12, trans. Charles Lett Feltoe, New Advent, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/360355.htm. (New Advent)

¹⁰ Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Canticle of Canticles, vol. 1, sermon 22, eCatholic2000, https://www.ecatholic2000.com/bernard/sermons-canticles-vol-1.shtml. (e-Catholic 2000)

¹¹ Devine, “St. Paul of the Cross.” (New Advent)

¹² Devine, “Passionists.” (New Advent)

¹³ Devine, “St. Paul of the Cross.” (New Advent)