Paul Mast was born in July 1946 in Kent County, Delaware. He is the third of five children of Amos and Julia Mast. He attended eight years of public elementary school, four years of Catholic High School and four years of Catholic college. He completed his theological studies at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans and was ordained in 1972. Following a number of pastoral assignments, he returned to graduate school and completed an M.A. degree in Religious Education in 1980 at Fordham University, an M.A. degree in Theology at The Catholic University of America, a Doctorate in Spirituality from the Mundelein Seminary in Chicago in 1993, and a post-graduate Certificate in Spiritual Direction from Neumann University in Philadelphia in 2000.

From 1996 to 2002 he designed and implemented a new formation program for the Lay Diaconate in the Diocese of Wilmington. On Sept. 12, 2002, he was appointed Administrator of a parish and helped guide them through the death and grieving process of their pastor. In June 2003, he was appointed Chaplain at St. Gertrude's Monastery and the Benedictine School for Autistic and Special Needs Children. During those years he served as spiritual director with four victims of clergy sex abuse and two sets of parents.

In 2012, he published his first novel, Fatal Absolution. It was a fictional account of the clergy sex abuse scandal. From Sept. 2013 to March 2014, he completed a sabbatical on the streets and in shelters with the homeless. In the summer of 2014, he retired from active ministry. In October 2014, he published Street Sabbatical, a journal account of his street encounters and conversions with the homeless. In 2016, he published a novella, A Cratchit Family Christmas, in which he brought forward a new story line from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. In 2017, in turned the novella into a one-man performance and went on the road giving live presentations of eight of the story characters. In the summer of 2019, he went on the road performing a new creation, Mark Twain 2.0 who comes back from the beyond to put his humorous spin on current issues.