ease in front of a group, that he actually liked giving talks and speeches, as well as answering questions and engaging in freewheeling discussion. I think it can fairly be said that public speaking invigorated him as a teenager, and it certainly did so during his adulthood. So, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Pete was pleased, but not entirely content with, being the “debate champion” of Immaculate Conception High School. For most of his high school years he was also a regular and quite formidable participant in statewide competitions for high school speech-makers, advancing round after round until he arrived at the final competition in the state capital of Trenton, where he captured either first or second place every year he competed.
Accomplished in ways that many high school students are not, and always at the top of his class, Pete Groeschel could have been considered by some to be a “teacher’s pet.” Yet that is not how his classmates remember him. He was clearly favored by some of the teachers. “Sr. Mercedida, our math teacher, loved him, and they remained good friends long after graduation,” Charles Kenworthy remembers. “The others, Sr. Benigna, our principal, and Sr. Catherine Grace thought he was pretty terrific, too. He never played on that, never thought to use it to his advantage. It was just the way things were.”
But nobody’s perfect, nor is any one person successful at all things. Pete Groeschel may have had wide-ranging interests, but those interests did not involve participating in sports beyond an occasional trip to the Caldwell Community Pool. Charles Kolb recalls that Pete and he were often the odd men out during physical education classes in high school. “Pete was kind of tall and lanky, and I was short and skinny. We didn’t fit in with the football players who made up most of the students in our phys-ed class.
“The professor—we called even the gym teachers ‘professor’ back then—really didn’t know what to do with us. I think he decided we needed to build up our bodies more, to get some muscles. So he asked us what sort of thing we thought would help us in that department. We ended up with a rowing machine and doing tumbling. This went on for the better part of four years, with us being excused from most of the activities of the physical education class as we ‘worked on our bodies,’ a process that never seemed to produce discernible results, no matter how much we rowed and tumbled. Occasionally, however, we’d be conscripted into one of the games the whole class was engaged in, like basketball. Once, when the teams were being chosen, the captain of one said (referring to Pete and me), ‘Who wants one of these two?’ Someone on the other team immediately replied: ‘You can have both of them!’”
Although he may not have been a great participant in sports, Pete rarely missed a school football, basketball, or baseball game. At least in part, I suspect, because he wanted to support his friends, such as Charles Kenworthy, who were on the teams. Charles Kolb recalled him always being there, usually serving refreshments or involved in some other useful activity.
He did the same at school dances, always showing up, always well-dressed and personable, often surrounded by a group of friends. Yet no one can remember him actually dancing. Perhaps he didn’t know how. Perhaps Pete Groeschel thought it inappropriate to do so considering his intense desire to become a priest. This latter theory certainly seems to make sense in light of what was written by N. John Hall, another good friend and classmate, and someone who also began preparation for priestly ordination after high school: “Pete and I … during our senior prom week, went to the Jesuit monastery at Poughkeepsie for a private retreat. Our act of difference and defiance was plain. While everyone else was living what for many were the culminating moments of four years of high school, we were hearing once again the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, interpreted for aspirants to the priesthood.”2 Whatever the reason, the future Fr. Benedict Groeschel refrained from dancing. All accounts indicate that although he may have missed the prom, he still had fun at dances, but was usually to be found behind the tables, serving drinks and snacks, or taking tickets at the door.
Pete seemed to gravitate quite naturally to jobs such as these. He liked to be of service in any way possible. He was never afraid of work, and was willing to take on almost any task offered. One of his early jobs seems to have taken him to the sort of place that is rather difficult to imagine Fr. Benedict ever visiting: a golf course. In fact, he actually spent quite a bit of time on one, never as a player, but as a caddy. During his high school years, Pete could often be found at the Essex Fells Golf Club on weekends and during the summer, golf bags slung over his shoulder, offering clubs to members. He also worked behind the counter at a store in Caldwell, where one of his duties was to prepare parcels for shipping. “He was good at that,” said Charles Kenworthy. “I learned how to tape a box from him so that it would never come apart.”
Youths are often drawn in many directions simultaneously, fascinated by a world that is still new, still filled with wonder. And the young Pete Groeschel was no exception. The visual arts began to hold a great attraction for him during his teenage years, and true to form he was not content to be a mere bystander or onlooker. “He loved art and wanted to learn to draw and paint, maybe even to sculpt,” said his sister Marjule. “That was something of a problem, as there were no studio art courses available at his high school. But Pete was Pete, and he wouldn’t let a mere fact like that stand in his way. He spent a lot of his time after school up at Caldwell College and Mount St. Dominic. These were girls’ schools and operated by the Dominicans. Pete worked out an arrangement up there with the mother superior to take private art lessons in exchange for cleaning up the classrooms and maybe doing a few other odd jobs. This was the sort of thing that was important to him. He was always curious, and he always needed to try things himself. To this day I think there are a few of the things he did hanging in Trinity Retreat. He rarely mentioned that they were his, but they were, and they were pretty good—and it’s not just because I’m his sister that I’m saying that. They were good.”
I’ve seen them many times, and I can attest that they actually are good. Yet I suspect that despite Pete Groeschel’s clear interest and talent in studio art, he had no overpowering desire to produce works of art himself—at least not in the long run. His real interest, I believe, lay in investigating the act of creativity itself, to figure out what it was that transformed a canvas and a few tubes of paint into a picture that was in some way satisfying and even deeply meaningful to its beholder, to learn how it was possible for a lump of clay to become a figure that appears so human it almost seems to breathe.
The creative act of the artist is in some ways a pale reflection of the overwhelming creative acts of God, and this is what I imagine really drew the future Fr. Benedict Groeschel into the artist’s studio. Like his fascination with science, Pete Groeschel’s interest in art really flowed from the same source from which most things in his life did: his profound awareness of the presence of God. For him neither art nor science was really a secular dimension of life: They were dimensions of life that could reveal God a little more clearly to us. For him, perhaps there was no such thing as a secular dimension at all; he saw all things as God’s domain in one way or other, and if you listened to him carefully you would learn that.
He loved poetry and enjoyed quoting it at odd and unexpected moments. I remember sitting with him one warm fall afternoon at Trinity Retreat. We were looking out on what was called the Millpond, a small, protected inlet of Long Island Sound that was a haven for seabirds on their migratory paths. Together we counted twenty-seven perfectly white swans gliding slowly through the water, each on its own path. It was a lovely and almost breathtaking visual image, a living canvas. “Earth’s crammed with heaven. And every common bush afire with God,” Father said completely out of the blue, quoting Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It was that attitude that drew Pete Groeschel into the artist’s studio, and it was that attitude that persisted throughout his life. And by the way, on that day earth really did seem to be “crammed with heaven.”
The knowledge of the visual arts that Pete Groeschel gained during his teen years informed the rest of his life. He became a regular museum-goer during that period and continued to be one as long as he was able. Even at the very end, when he was too frail to walk more than a short distance he could still occasionally be found at the
