who claims to feel the presence of God in his life at nearly every moment—but who somehow ignores the needs of those around him has missed the boat in a very serious way. Our love for Christ is not real, and can even be called an illusion, unless it overflows into a love for others. True love of Christ never exists in a vacuum; love of Christ and love of neighbor are two sides of the same coin and can never be completely separated. One of the most dramatic events of my early life demonstrated this overflow of love to me in a way that has stayed with me to this very day.
I have told this story many times before, so I will not repeat it fully here. If you want to know every detail, I suggest you refer to my book entitled Travelers Along the Way, in which I treated it at some length. In fact, it forms the beginning of that book, because it was an important beginning for me. The story concerns my second grade teacher, Sr. Teresa Maria, a Sister of Charity of Convent Station, New Jersey. She truly was a woman of great charity, not to mention a woman of great faith. In fact, Sr. Teresa Maria was, in my estimation, one of those quiet and hidden saints whom God sometimes places in our paths as we make our journey through life.
At the age of seven I was an avid people watcher, as many children are. I noticed what the adults around me were doing and tried to figure out why they were doing it. One day I noticed that Sr. Teresa Maria did something unusual. She left by herself after school, carrying a box. I wondered about that since the sisters usually went out two by two and rarely carried anything. A few days later I saw that she did the same thing; then she did it again and again, always heading in exactly the same direction. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, so I decided to make it my mission to find out. (My father had been reading to me from a book that had a title something like The Boy’s Book of Great Detective Stories. It had convinced me that I had the makings of a Sherlock Holmes—or at least a Hercule Poirot.) The next time sister appeared with her mysterious box I, the great detective, followed her, taking care that she didn’t see me.
Sister walked to a rundown building, very different from the places in which people I knew lived, and I peered through the window to discover her taking a tray of food out of the box and placing it on a table. In the room with her was the person to whom she was giving the food: a woman so misshapen and ugly that to my seven-year-old mind she could be only one thing—a witch. I had recently seen my very first movie, Walt Disney’s Snow White. There was a frightening witch in the movie, and to me the woman in the room looked just like her. The “witch” glanced up, and for an instant our eyes met through the grimy windowpane. In the next instant I was running for my life, and I continued to run until I reached the parish church, the place I thought would be most safe. I slowed down when I stepped inside (I had to: I was winded, and, of course, I knew you never ran in church), but I made my way as quickly as I reasonably could to our Blessed Mother’s altar, where I fell to my knees begging her to protect me from the witch, who—for all I knew—was waiting for me outside the church doors.
As I gasped for breath and prayed, I began to realize something that I had not appreciated before: the witch had done nothing bad to Sr. Teresa Maria. Sister was being kind to the witch and had remained unharmed. Perhaps even witches understood that a religious sister would do only nice things and never hurt anybody. As I looked up at Our Lady, I wondered if perhaps kindness and gentleness might be the key to taming witches—might be the key to many things. It was then that I felt, rather than heard, a voice. “Be a priest,” it said. “Be a priest.” It was at that moment that my life changed, that I was put on a path that I would follow for the rest of my years on earth.
I have Sr. Teresa Maria to thank for that; she was the catalyst that God used to make something start to grow in the life of a little boy in New Jersey. She and all the other wonderful religious women I knew in my boyhood helped me to take my first uncertain steps on that path. They taught me by their daily actions that prayer and kindness must always go together, that one was not complete without the other, but that together they could transform lives; they could bring you closer to Christ.
Like I said, I’m a sisters’ boy, and I couldn’t be prouder of it.
Chapter II
High School Days
The Tales Father Wasn’t Given the Time to Tell
And that’s it. The preceding short chapter was all Fr. Benedict ever wrote about his earliest years, all he was willing to confide. Over and over again he vowed to return to that period, to discuss his high school days, his growing sense of a vocation to the priesthood and religious life. Except for producing a few fragments, however, he never did that. In fact, he always seemed rather reluctant to talk about the early periods of his life in much detail, deferring such discussion again and again and choosing to speak about things that occurred at later points. I was never quite sure of his reasons for this and never felt completely comfortable asking him. I suspect, however, that at least part of it had to do with an unwillingness to put his family and close personal friends on public display in a book.
I believe another and perhaps stronger motive was that deep down he didn’t think that such things were very important. For example, he considered his life during his high school years to be quite unremarkable—of little interest to anyone who hadn’t known him well at that time. I believe he really conceived of his life not as the sum total of his days on earth, but as the work he did, as the living out of his priestly and religious vocation. It was the constant giving of himself to tasks that he deemed important and especially to people who needed his help that he considered noteworthy. Those things constituted his life; the rest did not. In a certain way, I think it can truthfully be said that his priesthood was his life and his life his priesthood. That is the real reason why, left to his own devices, Fr. Benedict might almost have been willing to write an autobiography that began with a sentence such as this: “I was born; seventeen years later I entered the Capuchins.”
Nevertheless, others vividly recall his early years and none of them remember him as unremarkable. Charles Kenworthy, a close friend of Fr. Benedict’s since the two met at Immaculate Conception High School in Montclair, New Jersey, as fourteen-year-old ninth graders, recalls a young man—known always as Pete—who was possessed of an unusual intensity for a young teenager, not to mention an unusual determination. He notes that many of the characteristics that became Fr. Benedict trademarks were already formed and in place by the time Pete Groeschel entered high school. “People always ask me what he was like back then,” Charles said. “There’s only one way for me to answer that question. I say he was the same. He was always consistent throughout his life. He never changed. He just became more and more like himself.”
That attitude was echoed by Fr. Benedict’s sister, Marjule Drury, who is thirteen years younger than her brother: “I was the second to the youngest in the family,” she said. “When my sister, Robin, was born, I was two years old and my mother was ill for a long time afterward. She was unable even to come home from the hospital for about eight months. There was no one to take care of me except Peter. He would pick me up at the babysitter’s promptly after school and spend the rest of the day with me until our father came home that night. It must have bothered him some to have such a young child tagging along after him all the time, but I don’t think he ever expressed that. He took good care of me. He was attentive, loving—he made me feel safe. He’s been making people feel safe his whole life, I guess.”
Along with a grammar school, Immaculate Conception High School was part of a large and bustling parish, the sort that were once called powerhouses and could be counted on to have innumerable Masses and very clogged parking lots on a Sunday or holy day morning. The faculty consisted of members of the Sisters of Charity in Convent Station, New Jersey, augmented by several laymen and women. There were three curates in the parish during the time that Pete Groeschel was there—an almost unimaginable number from our present point of view—and they, too, taught in the high school, forming the nucleus of the religion department, as well as sometimes coaching the school’s
