Hidden in the Shadow of the Cross

I first discovered Mother St. Paul in the 1990s. A parish friend was handing out photocopies of her slim Simple Meditations after Mass with the same fervor as a Russian writer distributing a samizdat newsletter in the old Soviet Union. My wife, an eager reader, naturally read the book first. She promptly told me to do the same. So at Advent, I did. As a relatively new convert to Catholicism, I had hit a sophomore slump in my faith. I couldn’t quite grasp why Christ, despite my affections and prayers, wasn’t in front of me bulldozing an easier, carefree path through life. 

Mother St. Paul had a no-nonsense answer for that in a meditation on St. Joseph finding no room in Bethlehem:

This is one more trial for Joseph’s faith . . . he is taking a most inconvenient and strangely inconsistent journey at the command of a heathen king who wants to count his subjects. Strange that the Son of God, in whose company Joseph knows he is walking, cannot arrange things a little more conveniently! These would probably have been my criticisms; but we are thinking of St. Joseph! Those who live their lives side by side with Jesus and Mary do not criticize God’s dealings. Enough for Joseph to obey without puzzling his brain and upsetting his peace by asking questions. What a great saint was St. Joseph!

I now read Simple Meditations, first published in 1918, every Advent and Christmastide, as well as throughout the liturgical year. My wife hunted down used copies of Mother St. Paul’s other works (she wrote six books in total), including Passio Christi: Meditations for Lent, which I consider my essential Lenten reading. I can’t go past Ash Wednesday without it. It comes with me to my visitation of the seven churches on Holy Thursday and stays with me until the Easter Vigil Mass. 

Despite her exceptional ability as a spiritual writer, Mother St. Paul’s biography is thin and her life before consecration unknown and uncelebrated. The little we do know comes from the brief prefaces to her books. She ran a retreat house for religious in the early 1900s in the diocese of Birmingham in central England. (The bishop stamped her books with his imprimatur.) At some point she moved to Belgium, where she died in 1940 before the Nazi invasion. All she left behind was her books. Even her birth name is a mystery.

A few devoted readers post quotes from her books on social media, but otherwise there is little trace of her on the internet (a feat that might serve as one of the miracles needed for her canonization). Such anonymity is a gift for a spiritual writer. It offers a certain clarity for the reader. There are no distractions from the meditation—no side roads leading to the writer’s upbringing and biography, no awareness of her foibles and sins, no sentimentality over her physical and emotional sufferings. 

Still, from her writings emerges a vivid sense of character: a holy woman who brooks no complaining, loves her Lord and his mother, exhorts all in her path to follow God unreservedly out of deep love for souls, and regards her Mother Church as the triumph of the world. 

Dying to self to follow God is a frequent motif in her writing. In Passio Christi, she reflects on Jesus being brought before Pontius Pilate following his torture: “How can I show my gratitude? By promising Him now, at once, while He is standing in the scarlet cloak and wearing the crown of thorns, that I will never again willfully deliver Him up. Self shall be delivered up, but never Jesus.”

Reading Passio Christi, I learned about some of the old traditions of the Church. The book opens with a meditation not for Ash Wednesday but for Quinquagesima Sunday, the last Sunday before Lent. After learning of it, I can’t help but think something is missing from the liturgical year without it.

Quinquagesima spans the Sunday through Tuesday. Today, the culture would have us prepare for Ash Wednesday as gluttons and drunkards stumbling out of Mardi Gras. Quinquagesima Sunday signals us to approach Lent more soberly, with preparation. Mother St. Paul’s meditation for Ash Wednesday pulls no punches: “Those ashes that are being sprinkled on your head were Palms of victory once. What has reduced Christ’s triumph to ashes? What but your sins? You who shouted: Hosannah! last Palm Sunday, you who were so full of good resolutions at the end of last Lent, what have you been doing since? Remember! and having remembered, repent.” The Christian life isn’t for the soft. Ask Mother St. Paul’s namesake. 

In our age of doubt and despair, the Catholic triumphalism that underlies much of Mother St. Paul’s writing is deeply refreshing. In Simple Meditations, she reflects on the Wise Men pondering the star:

God often puts stars in our horizon; new lights which we cannot help noticing. A Protestant, for example, sees the light of the Holy Catholic Church. A Catholic sees a light about some religious duty, or about the religious life. All who are faithful see stars at one time or another, and they can never be as though they had not seen them. They may despise them, and not follow them; but they cannot forget them. What have I done with the stars which God has put in my horizon?

For Mother St. Paul, the Catholic Church was the star on her horizon, the one she turned to daily and devoted her life to. By following it, one is brought closer to Christ. 

At a time when many support Christian nationalism, in one form or another, Mother St. Paul’s meditations remind us that we don’t need the Church to be our cultural or political force. We need it to be bold in its call to repentance, conversion, and salvation of souls—its true triumph. 

Though many have never heard of Mother St. Paul, I am certain that her exhortations to humility and love of God’s will have kept many souls on a holy path. More than one hundred years since her first books appeared, she remains hidden in the shadow of the Cross—no doubt exactly where she wants to be.