longer than I had planned.
I treasure the memory of those evenings, both because of their beauty and because of their depth. You see, such times at the water’s edge were rarely simply star gazing; they often became occasions of prayer and meditation for me. They were moments when I would feel especially aware of the magnificence of God’s creation, of the infinite power that caused our universe to spring into being and continually sustains it—the power that sustains each one of us with love. I like to think that watching the night sky allowed me to sense in some slight way the enormity and awesome complexity of God’s plan. It permitted me to feel concretely the truth of our Divine Savior’s words in the Gospel of St. Matthew: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will” (Mt 10:29).
These words show a great deal about the person who was Pete Groeschel and the priest he became. They demonstrate a breadth of vision, a way of seeing things that did not compartmentalize, that saw no reason to put science and faith into different categories or to imagine them as opposing forces. As Charles Kenworthy notes: “It never occurred to him for a second that there was any sort of conflict between science and faith. He would have thought an idea like that was crazy.
“Einstein was at Princeton back when we were in high school, you know. And Princeton’s not all that far from Caldwell. Pete was very aware of that. He never said it that I remember, but I knew he would have given almost anything to meet Einstein. He never did, of course, but he wanted to in the worst way. He carried a quotation of Einstein’s in his pocket on and off for most of his life. It’s a quotation about mystery, and Pete was very impressed by it. He saw a real religious dimension in it, and he used it in some of his writings. He had a great regard for Einstein, for science in general.”
The quotation from Einstein that meant so much to Fr. Benedict was this: “The deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God. My religion is a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds.”1 These words of Albert Einstein capture the way Fr. Benedict understood the universe—the way he understood it even as a boy.
I think they illustrate something else, as well: some of the changes that have occurred in our culture in the lifetimes of people of Fr. Benedict’s generation—changes he worried and prayed about often. When Pete Groeschel was a boy it was not considered odd for the greatest scientist of the age to write in words that seemed more religious than scientific. More than sixty years later we seem to inhabit a world in which science—or at least some scientists—has all but declared war on religion in any and every form. The time in which Fr. Benedict grew up did not do that. The culture still had respect and even admiration for Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It was a time in which religious thought was not barred from the public square and theologians were not sequestered in ivory towers but participated prominently in the important debates of the time. Their pictures regularly appeared on the covers of magazines such as Time, and they were listened to when they commented on science, or social policy, or the arts, or any of the many other aspects of human life.
It was this world that Pete Groeschel inhabited in his teens, a world where faith did not have to be on the defensive, and perhaps it was that world that helped to make Fr. Benedict Groeschel as open to the ideas of others, as confident in his faith as he was, and so able to see the workings of God in the night sky, the world around him, the joys and sorrows of daily life—in everything.
Friendship meant a great deal to the young Peter Groeschel. His outgoing personality, his easy humor, and his apparent inability to hold a grudge attracted many. Those who knew him best remember him being frequently surrounded by people as he made his way down the halls of Immaculate Conception High School, often becoming the center of attention without really having to do much to achieve that status. Yet I suspect he did not think of all those people as his friends. That position was reserved for a far smaller group of people who remained part of his life until his final days.
“We met during registration for ninth grade,” said Charles Kolb. “I remember him standing there with a book bag so full that he could barely lift if off the ground. We started talking, and we were suddenly friends. We’ve been friends ever since. We ate lunch together every day at school. He was very dependable. We would spend a good deal of time at each other’s houses after school. I remember he loved to come to my house, which was a good distance from his, especially when my mother was cooking sauerbraten and potato dumplings. He couldn’t get enough of that.”
Most of us lose the friends of our high school years as the decades pass by. Those people often seem to fall away, becoming part of a distant and discarded past. But Fr. Benedict was never one to discard people and so retained not just friendships but close relationships with those he had cared for most in high school. “I was having some trouble with my eyes and needed some help, and he knew it. So he told me he wanted me to come to St. Joseph Manor, the nursing home he was living in. He thought we could spend our last years together, just as we spent our high school years together. He tried to arrange it,” said Charles Kolb. “I wish it could have happened.”
He felt the same way toward others, maintaining close contact with Charles Kenworthy, Edward Widstock, N. John Hall and all the others who had formed his “inner circle” in high school, rarely failing to visit them when he was able to do so, never failing to pray for them and their families.
Pete was called a bookworm by many of his fellow students. He never took offense at that assessment and never thought that any was intended. For the most part, in fact, he agreed with the characterization. He was drawn to books as a boy and read avidly on many subjects throughout his life. His living quarters at Trinity Retreat were lined with bookshelves, all the contents carefully arranged according to topic or author (and as far as authors went, St. Augustine was always given pride of place, with Cardinal John Henry Newman a somewhat distant second). Entering his room, which was rather dark, was like entering a small library, and if you pulled one of the books from the shelves and opened it, you would probably find that the text had been underlined in various places and that notes had been scribbled in the margins in Father’s unique and occasionally decipherable handwriting.
But he was far more than just a bookworm. As anyone who has ever met him can readily attest, his personality was just too strong and too extroverted for such a description to be able to sum him up. As his friends state over and over again, he was liked by almost everybody and could get along with almost anybody. He was elected class treasurer (Who knows? Perhaps this was early training for his years as almoner for the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal and as fundraiser for innumerable charitable projects), and he was prefect of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin. He also joined the debate society, quickly and decisively becoming its star. “Pete had the words,” Charles Kenworthy recalled. “He could come up with just the right word without a second’s hesitation. It was because of him that our school always came out number one in regional debates—always. It was a foregone conclusion when Pete was on the team. We couldn’t lose.”
And none of the countless people who have heard Fr. Benedict preach over the decades would be surprised by that statement. His preaching was legendary for both its power and its content, not to mention its sincerity. For he did indeed have the words, words that won debates in his youth and brought people closer to God in his later years. Peter Groeschel had been given the gift of words in a very special way and for a very special purpose, and he never failed to make use of that gift in his priestly life. He was also given another gift, I think, one that he claimed his mother had as well, the gift of feeling at ease in almost any situation, and that cannot be ignored.
One of the most common phobias in our rather neurotic world involves public speaking. The thought of having to talk to a large group of people—especially for an extended period of time—affects many, and even paralyzes some. This, however, is a fear
