football coach, a fact that Fr. Benedict thought mildly amusing: “If you think about it long enough, you’ll realize the two enterprises actually have a good deal in common,” he once said.
Immaculate Conception High School was like a magnet, drawing students from miles around; it was simply the school to which a Catholic family from that part of northern New Jersey would send its children if at all possible during the forties and fifties. The parish is still there today, smaller and less unwieldy perhaps, but looking much the same as it did when Pete Groeschel arrived there as a ninth-grade student in September 1947. The high school building, plain and square, with a front made of tan stucco and brick, looks little different from hundreds of other Catholic school buildings of that era: obviously constructed with an eye to serviceability rather than aesthetics, but still solid and appealing in its own way.
Located a couple of towns away from Caldwell, Immaculate Conception was a trek for Pete: too far to get to on foot, and so every day he boarded the number twenty-nine trolley on Bloomfield Avenue for a half-hour ride to school. By the time he arrived he had usually been up for hours, having attended early Mass in his home parish (often acting as unofficial sacristan by opening the church with a key entrusted to him by the pastor). His daily assistance at Mass was not always common knowledge among Pete’s wider circle of friends, but the ones who knew him best were very aware of it. “You knew he wouldn’t miss Mass except under the most unusual of circumstances,” said Edward Widstock, another good friend from that period. “He had to leave home early to get to Mass and then to school on time, and during the winter that meant leaving in the dark of night. Pete always was very considerate, and that consideration together with the darkness occasionally produced amusing results. One day he showed up in school wearing one brown shoe and one black one. No, he wasn’t trying to inaugurate a new fashion fad; he hadn’t turned on a light as he got dressed so as not to wake his brother with whom he shared a room. I guess he was just feeling around in the closet until he came up with one right shoe and one left one, and he just put them on. I don’t think he noticed until after sunrise that his shoes didn’t match at all.
“And Pete could very easily laugh at himself. In fact, I think that he liked to laugh at himself. He didn’t feel the least bit embarrassed to be wearing mismatched shoes; he just thought it was funny. I probably would never have noticed his shoes if he hadn’t pointed them out to me—and not just to me: he pointed them out to everybody, and every time he did he had a good laugh.”
The ability to laugh at himself, at his own foibles, to be absolutely unselfconscious about his physical appearance, was a characteristic of Pete Groeschel, and it never changed throughout his entire life. “Your hair has turned gray!” a slightly startled woman once exclaimed, after not having seen Fr. Benedict for several decades. “It’s an optical illusion,” Father immediately responded, rubbing his very bald head and laughing. “I’ve always looked like something out of the Canterbury Tales,” he would announce nonchalantly while walking down a busy New York City street, his flowing habit, Franciscan cord, and beard attracting stares from all directions. He never seemed to care, never made even the slightest effort to blend in. Nor did he choose to wear his habit rather than the black suit and Roman collar favored by most priests in order to attract attention. He did it because he loved being a priest and a religious and saw no reason to hide that love.
“He was always very religious, always devout,” Charles Kenworthy said, “and you could see that devotion when he served Mass, which he often did at Immaculate Conception Church. He was usually one of the boys who were chosen to do that when a Mass was being celebrated for the school. I served Mass there, too, but Pete did regularly, and you could see that he was really in his element, that he was really drawn into it. He also served Mass early in the morning at the sisters’ chapel in the convent. There were five or six boys who did that, in a kind of rotation, and he was always one of them. We knew he was going to be a priest. Everybody did. It was so obvious that it was almost difficult to imagine him being anything else. His faith was so strong you could almost touch it. You could kind of feel it when you were with him. I don’t think it ever wavered. That was just the way he was.”
Such remarks—and there are many of them—seem almost extravagant, and you can’t help but wonder if that is really the way people saw Pete Groeschel during his high school years or if people’s memories were influenced and subtly altered by knowledge of the rest of Fr. Benedict’s remarkable life. Perhaps there is a bit of both in these nearly seventy-year-old recollections. Or perhaps these memories are spot on. Whatever they are, they are simply the way that Fr. Benedict’s friends from that period speak of him, the way they recall him at this point. And it is interesting to think that despite the seeming extravagance of such statements, they probably carry even more weight than they seem to.
Back in the forties and very early fifties the Catholic Church seemed able to produce as many vocations to the priesthood and religious life as it wanted. There were, in fact, three other boys from Pete Groeschel’s high school class who entered minor seminaries after graduation—and that’s three out of only 136 students! Assuming the graduating class was divided roughly equally by gender that meant that out of slightly fewer than seventy boys, four believed they had priestly vocations. That’s a pretty high number, and when you stop to realize that several of the girls entered religious communities at the same time, the number of vocations produced from that small group seems almost amazing by contemporary standards. Yet it is always Peter Groeschel who seems singled out when the members of the class of 1951 speak of priestly vocations; it is always he who was known as “the priest to be” among them.
At Immaculate Conception High School in the forties there were three courses of study open to the students: the classical course, the scientific one, and the commercial one. Pete Groeschel was in the classical program, studying such subjects as Latin, English, History, and French; and although his report cards look very faded these days, they still reveal that he excelled in practically all his courses, and they also make it clear that writing and languages came easily to him. Yet in some ways it seemed his bent was almost in the opposite direction. He exhibited a love of and even a hunger for scientific knowledge. He was endlessly intrigued by the “workings of creation,” as Charles Kenworthy put it. “He always carried a briefcase crammed full of books. Most of them were textbooks, of course, but not all. He liked to read about science, especially astronomy, and, to a slightly lesser extent, physics. I guess biology didn’t interest him quite so much, but he found the physical sciences captivating. He read about them whenever he had the time and tried to learn as much as he could on his own.”
This love of science, and especially of astronomy, persisted throughout Fr. Benedict’s entire life. In his later years I recall him being fascinated by an article he found in The New York Times that described some new astronomical discovery. As soon as he was done reading it he asked his secretary, Natalie di Targiani, to get him as much material regarding it from the Internet as she could find. He devoured every word and discussed it for days with a genuine excitement. Yet his was a very specific approach to science and the physical world. He never looked at anything mechanistically or materialistically. Such an approach seemed not just incomplete or even faulty to him, but absurd. His perception of the universe could be summed up perfectly with the psalmist’s words: “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork” (Ps 19). The attitude of Pete Groeschel as a high school boy and Fr. Benedict as an elderly man are, I think, the same, and are revealed in the following paragraphs he wrote in 2012. They were originally intended to form part of another section of A Friar’s Tale, a section he didn’t live to complete. But I think they fit perfectly right here:
I have always loved gazing at the sky. In fact, I have been utterly fascinated by astronomy since I was a small boy with a fifty-cent telescope. For nearly four decades I was blessed to live by Long Island Sound, and watching the night sky while I stood at the shore was one of my great pleasures. On a good night it seemed that endless stars shone above me, each one reflected in the dark, shimmering water at my feet. I could spend quite a while like that, noting stars and constellations, the planets in their orbits, the
