Paolo Francesco Danei was born on 3 January 1694 at Ovada, in the Alessandria region of Piedmont, then in the Duchy of Savoy. He was among the sixteen children of Luca (Luke) Danei, a dry-goods merchant of noble but straitened means, and Anna Maria Massari; only six of the children survived infancy. From earliest years the crucifix was his book and the Crucified his model. He received schooling from a priest at Cremolino in Lombardy, advanced in study and virtue, heard daily Mass, frequented the sacraments, prayed long before the Blessed Sacrament, and taught catechism near home. At fifteen he left school to help his father at Castellazzo. Around the age of nineteen he experienced a deep conversion to a life of prayer, shaped by reading Saint Francis de Sales's Treatise on the Love of God and by Capuchin direction; thereafter he was convinced that God is most readily found in the Passion of Christ.
In early manhood he declined an honorable marriage and a substantial inheritance from his uncle, the priest Christopher Danei, keeping only the priest's Breviary. After a brief attempt in 1715 to join a crusade against the Turks, he returned to family duties and for a time assisted an aging couple at Novello, refusing their offer to make him heir. In 1713 and again more decisively at twenty-six, he resolved to live as a hermit. The Bishop of Alessandria clothed him in a black penitential tunic bearing the emblem of the Passion; barefoot and bareheaded, he withdrew to a narrow cell behind the church of Saint Charles at Castellazzo Bormida. There, during a forty-day retreat at the end of 1720, he wrote the Rule of a new congregation first called the Poor of Jesus, later the Congregation of the Discalced Clerics of the Holy Cross and Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ—the Passionists. Tradition holds that in vision he beheld the black habit his companions would wear. He took the name Brother Paul of the Cross and served the poor and sick in whom he contemplated the face of the Crucified.
His first companion was his younger brother John Baptist. Encouraged by Cardinal Corradini, the brothers worked in a new hospital in Rome. After a short course in pastoral theology, Pope Benedict XIII ordained them priests in Saint Peter's Basilica on 7 June 1727. Permission to gather companions had already been granted orally in 1725. They preached missions especially in remote and neglected places. The first Passionist Retreat was opened on Monte Argentario in 1737; Paul insisted that houses be called "Retreats" to mark the solitude and at least three daily hours of contemplative prayer needed by those who preach the Cross. Pope Benedict XIV approved the Rule in 1741 and the Congregation itself by brief in 1746. At the first general chapter, held at the Retreat of the Presentation on Monte Argentario on 10 April 1747, Paul was unanimously elected first superior general against his own wishes, an office he held until death. He remained a model of regular observance while founding new houses and never ceased preaching, burning with desire for the salvation of souls. Sacred missions brought numerous conversions; he labored especially among the poor of the Maremma and the remote islands of the Tuscan archipelago. More than two thousand of his letters of spiritual direction survive; his preaching during the Jubilee of 1750 was memorable. He prayed for fifty years for the conversion of England and left that devotion as a legacy to his sons.
In 1771, with Mother Mary Crucified Costantini, he established at Tarquinia (then Corneto) the first monastery of Passionist nuns, contemplative women dedicated to the memory of the Passion. He never relaxed his austere manner of life. Worn by austerities and age, he died in Rome on 18 October 1775 at the Retreat of Saints John and Paul, leaving some one hundred eighty religious in twelve Retreats. His body rests in the Basilica of Saints John and Paul on the Caelian Hill. He was beatified on 1 October 1852 and canonized on 29 June 1867 by Pope Pius IX. His feast, once kept on 28 April, is now observed on 19 October. Constant personal union with the Cross and Passion of the Lord marked his sanctity; he carried every Christian virtue to a heroic degree, and miracles of grace, especially the conversion of hardened sinners, attested the favor he enjoyed with God.
May Saint Paul of the Cross obtain for us a living devotion to the Passion of Jesus, that we may love God and neighbor through the Cross today.
