One day as his mother was engaged in fall housecleaning, she felt sick and lay down on her bed. Within an hour she was paralyzed from the waist down. She never walked again. From that fateful moment, her life changed permanently. Others would care for her basic needs. She had to be bathed and dressed. She never gardened outside her home again. And her spiritual life was never the same.
“I saw someone with a chronic illness,” Paul recalls. “I saw the effect this has on a family. It played a major role in my decision to study for the priesthood. I bargained with God. ‘God, if you will cure my mother, I will offer myself to you.’” He adds self-consciously, “I know that’s pretty primitive, but it’s true. I’m not there now.”
His mother’s illness consumed the family—her husband Carmen, her children, her siblings, her relatives and friends, and Johnson, a devoted African-American home health aide who cared for her for twenty-five years. Grace and her family stormed heaven with prayer that she would be restored to full health, walking again. In those early years of constant prayer she made handmade signs with one word: “WALK.” The signs were all over the house, in every room. That was their hope. That was their prayer.
Paul finished Brescia University in 1968, graduating with a degree in political science. In his senior year he decided to enter seminary to pursue a process of vocational discernment for priesthood. He studied philosophy, Latin, and Greek at Mount Saint Paul Seminary in Waukesha, Wisconsin, for one year before entering Saint Meinrad Seminary in Saint Meinrad, Indiana. He graduated in 1973 from Saint Meinrad School of Theology and was ordained a Catholic priest on May 26, 1973, in the diocese of Trenton, New Jersey.
While in seminary, Paul confronted his own physical crisis. In January 1972 he participated in a travel seminar on Christian archeology in Rome. There he began to lose weight and suffered daily fatigue. His health continued to deteriorate. On March 17, 1972, he was ordained as a transitional deacon at Saint Meinrad Seminary. He returned to New Jersey and exercised his new ministry as a deacon during Holy Week, preaching for the first time on Easter Sunday morning. On Easter Monday, April 3, 1972, he awakened and could not lift his head from his pillow. He was rushed to the emergency room. His blood sugar had soared over eight hundred (normal is between seventy and one hundred). He drifted into a diabetic coma. After three and a half days, he woke up. The attending physician was astonished, and later that day, he told Paul, “There’s no reason for your recovery. You were in the process of dying. I don’t use this language, but this is a miracle.”
Paul was astonished too. “I kept asking, ‘Why, God? Why are you doing this to me, after all that I have promised to do for you?’ That was my question. Eventually I developed a prayer. It was very simple. As I administered my morning dose of insulin, I thanked God for the gift of another day. I saw it as an opportunity serve in ways that God would make known to me.”
As Paul continued his new ministry as a priest, his mother continued her spiritual journey as well. She surprised everyone in the family. When Paul returned home from his assignment at an inner-city parish in Trenton, he found that all the “WALK” signs were gone. He was shocked. He asked his Mom, “What have you done? Where are all the signs?” She replied simply, “I don’t need them anymore.” Paul responded, “You, all of us, have been praying for you to walk for more than seven years. I don’t understand!”
His mother declared, “Paul, I learned that I have been praying for the wrong thing. I’ve been asking God to take me back to the past. As I prayed for what I wanted, I failed to see and know that God was here with me—as I am! My prayer used to be asking God to help me walk. Now my prayer is thanking God today for his presence in all of you who care for me. I am blessed and healed.”
His mother’s reaction to her own condition left an indelible mark on Paul’s soul. “I learned,” he concludes, “that you cannot be consumed by your need because it may block God from your life.” And like his mother, Paul faced a future of chronic illness—diabetes. The doctor warned him he would die before he was sixty, but he foiled the doctor’s prediction. “My fifty-ninth year was very difficult,” he says. “I told no one. But reaching sixty was an amazing experience.”
After his own confrontation with death, Paul returned to Saint Meinrad, received his degree, and was ordained to the priesthood. He was assigned as an associate pastor to the aforementioned inner-city church in Trenton—St. Joachim. It had two thousand households and a pastor who had served there for more than forty years. It was a traditional Catholic parish that lived in the world of the 1950s. “The people were wonderful, and their life stories beyond belief,” Paul recalls. “It was a miracle St. Joachim’s even existed,” Paul jokes. “It was unique, to say the least.”
His quiet and contagious spirituality quickly brought him back to Saint Meinrad. After only two years in the parish, Paul was appointed in 1975 as associate spiritual director and two years later as spiritual director for the entire seminary. He served eight years in a demanding environment in which vocations to the priesthood plummeted and seminarians wrestled with their callings. He earned a certificate in spirituality and spiritual direction in 1982 from the Institute for Spiritual Leadership in Chicago, affiliated with Loyola University. There he immersed himself in mystical theology, the Enneagram, and Jungian depth psychology. Paul plumbed the theology of Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Merton and the meditations of the Spanish mystics, especially St. John of the Cross. The via negativa or “way of negation” of mystics resonated with his personal experience of God as mystery. “That is the most important part of my spiritual tradition,” he says emphatically. “Their sense of mystery helped me deal with my mom’s situation and my own physical condition. Why? Why? We can’t understand these questions. Anselm said it was faith seeking understanding, but we can ask those questions only because God exists.”
In 1985 he left Saint Meinrad, exhausted by the demands of his ministry of spiritual direction and formation. He was also desperately worried about his mother. His father had died in 1981, and his mother was now living alone. His brother, Charlie, was the primary family caregiver—until Charlie’s job forced a move to North Carolina. Paul went home to take over the role of primary caregiver. It was 1985, and his mother would live in steadily declining health until 1998. For the next fourteen years, Paul served on the staff of two large suburban Catholic parishes, ten of those years as pastor, while continuing to coordinate care for his mother.
“Most of the week was consumed by the church ministry,” he remembers. “But Mondays were for Mommy. Technically, it was my day off; in reality, it was my day to oversee her life, medical, financial, and home care issues.” Her last years were very difficult and included three major surgeries. A full-time caregiver, Vicki from Guatemala, moved in. More than anything else, Paul says, “I was concerned about her being alone.”
After her eightieth birthday and final surgery, Paul’s mother entered a nursing home for one hundred days, was released, and died suddenly on the morning of July 7, 1998. At the same time, Paul found himself alone and sought therapy. He was also traumatized by the murder of a seven-year-old girl in his congregation. The boy who killed her was an orphan, adopted when he was three years old and abused. This tragedy triggered Paul’s memories of his own sexual abuse by a priest when he was a young boy. “It was the lowest point of my life,” Paul recalls. “It’s remarkable that I made it. I was mainly angry at institutions—especially the church. I loved the people. I wished I could only have been a priest without being associated with the church.”
While undergoing therapy, he had a breakthrough: “I discovered I could name my ministry in a personal way, instead of an ecclesiastical way. That was the key. The result was that I can absorb a lot of people’s pain. I’ve learned that healing happens as you create a sacred space so people can tell their own story.”
Early in his New Jersey pastorates, Paul met a remarkable woman, Hilare Reinold, at St. Benedict Church in Homdel. She was a homemaker and regularly attended daily Mass. She told Paul she liked to visit people
