St. Paul of the Cross

Who they were

Paul Danei of Genoa received in his twenties the vision that fixed his life: a black habit with the badge of the Holy Name over a heart, and the mission it meant, which was a community vowed to keep alive the memory of the Passion of Jesus. He called the Passion the greatest and most overwhelming work of God's love, and he judged the world's forgetting of it to be its deepest wound.

The Passionists he founded took the strictest poverty in the Church of their day and preached parish missions across Italy for decades, with Paul himself their most sought after preacher and director. His letters record something else: some forty five years of interior desolation while he was consoling everyone else, which puts him beside St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Calcutta. And one thread ran the whole length of his life. For fifty years he prayed daily for the return of England to the faith, a prayer he never saw answered and never dropped. Two generations later St. John Henry Newman was received into the Church by a Passionist.

Why people turn to St. Paul of the Cross

Everyone who prays the Sorrowful Mysteries. And carriers of decades old unanswered prayers, with St. Monica and St. Ansgar: fifty years for England is the patronage, and he died with it still open.

How to ask their intercession

One set of Sorrowful Mysteries, unhurried, placing yourself in the scene rather than watching it, which was his method. For the long prayer, say its age out loud, and then keep it.