By Christopher Doran
One of the things about Paul that stands out most in my mind is his love. Paul ran across many people who were hostile and bitter, who didn’t know the Lord, or who didn’t understand the meaning of being a good Catholic, and he had a very special way of covering them, completely filling them, with his love.
He was a hard worker and was very dedicated to doing a good job at everything he did.
He was relentless in his efforts to make his daily meditation and his special visits to the Blessed Sacrament, and one of his unique qualities was his dedication to Mary. We often said the Rosary together daily, and I saw the fruits of this in much of what he did during the balance of his days.
He had a very well-rounded spiritual, apostolic, and Christian life.
Paul was what I considered to be a true lay-contemplative, a person living in the world and practicing spiritual discipline for the betterment of the whole Christian community. Paul had a personal commitment to the evangelical counsels, the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and he practiced them in an exemplary manner throughout the time I knew him. He had a very good balance between his prayer life, his daily work as an architect, and his apostolic action as a Catholic layman.
He had a unique capability for action. He found many areas that other people didn’t want to be involved in, such as visiting the sick or visiting people who weren’t friendly or nice to go see. He did a lot of counseling, particularly with younger people, myself included. But most importantly he seemed to have a beautiful and friendly way of sharing the fruits of his contemplation with those who weren’t familiar with the deeper spiritual life of the Church.
Paul’s ideal was a life of grace in the world and total dedication through Mary to the service of the Lord, but his inner secret of loving the Lord was what affected the environment wherever he went.
It affected his work environment. For many years he worked in offices with other people who were not Christian and who were very hostile to all of what Paul stood for and practiced.
He defended himself in his way of life very valiantly and in several instances converted people who were outspoken atheists back to the Church.
On a social basis Paul also influenced many of the environments that he went into. I recall going to parties with him which were what we called “duty dances,” situations in which his office would have a party and he would have to go, even though he didn’t really want to. Paul would end up finding one or two people who just needed to talk and be listened to, and would turn the whole event into an apostolic growth experience rather than just a social blow-out that amounted to nothing more than a lost memory.
On one occasion we went to a concert by the Irish Rovers at Phoenix College. Afterwards Paul’s employer asked the singers to go up and have drinks.
So we went to a nearby bar and sat at several different tables. One of the men who sat at the table with us immediately started criticizing the Church. Paul, after several hours of talking with him, finally found out that he had left the Church, was living in a bad marriage, and was merely criticizing the church as a basis for defending his own wrong choice. Paul showed him how he could correct the situation by leaving the woman he was co-habitating with and returning to his wife and to the fullness of the life of grace in the Church. I was really edified by what Paul said to the man, because I never would have tried it myself. But Paul in his loving and tactful way continued to talk to this fellow until he found out what his problem was and then showed him the way back to the Church.
In summary, Paul’s ideals were built on his daily prayer-life and overflowed into many, many facets of his life. Many people met him and wondered what made him different. And I believe the secret that made Paul different was his closeness to God, his true dedication to Mary, and his real and ongoing commitment to seeking the life of perfection in the world.
(This article appears courtesy of Miles Jesu magazine. To learn more about the Catholic lay institute Miles Jesu, call 1-800-654-7945 or visit their website at www.MilesJesu.com.)
