Passionists, a religious congregation of priests of the Roman Catholic Church, the object of whose institute, indicated by their name, is to preach 'Jesus Christ and him crucified.' The founder, St Paul of the Cross, was born in 1694 near Genoa, obtained the sanction of Benedict XIV. in 1741, and died at the mother-house of the society on the Cœlian Hill at Rome in 1775. The cross appears everywhere as their emblem, and a large crucifix forms part of their very striking costume. They practise many personal austerities, and their ministerial work consists chiefly in holding what are called 'missions' wherever they are invited by the local clergy, in which sermons on the passion of Christ, on sin, and on repentance, together with the hearing of confessions, hold the principal places. For a time the congregation remained in obscurity; but in the first half of the 19th century it rose into notice. In 1842 it secured a footing in England, whose conversion had been the founder's special aim, and in which there are now five houses; there are two in Ireland and one in Scotland. The American province, begun in 1852, numbers between one and two hundred religious houses. There are many Passionist fathers in Bulgaria and Roumania, in Belgium and New South Wales.