I still remember the name of the priest. It was Fr. Fitzpatrick, and I tried to pay attention, to understand what this man in his golden vestments was doing at the marble altar. I couldn’t, for he spoke a strange language and did many strange things. In fact, at times it seemed as if he wasn’t doing much at all. But I knew differently because my father and my mother had told me that something wonderful happened when priests like Fr. Fitzpatrick were at the altar. They told me that Jesus was also there, that He comes to be with us because He loves us.
My attention wandered from Fr. Fitzpatrick and became fixed on the tabernacle—although I don’t think I knew that word then. It was a gleaming gold box at the center of the altar, and I knew it was very important because my father had told me so. He told me that in this tabernacle dwells Jesus himself. I tried to understand how this could be so, but I couldn’t—the box looked too small and not at all like a home. But I knew my father would never lie to me, and so I believed. Mostly during the Mass the tabernacle remained closed. But occasionally Fr. Fitzpatrick opened it, and each time he did I strained, trying to make myself tall enough to get a good look at what was inside. I could never quite manage it, and that was frustrating because I wanted very much to see Jesus’ house.
I thought very hard, trying to understand how Jesus could be in this box. I couldn’t figure it out. The best I could do was to think of my last visit to my cousin Julie’s home. She was a couple of years older than I, and she had a dollhouse. It was fitted out with a kitchen, a living room, a dining room, and a couple of bedrooms. Could it be that inside the tabernacle Jesus was living in something like that? To my five-year-old mind it seemed almost reasonable, and I began to wonder if Jesus had a bed in there, or a lamp. Did He even need a lamp? I was dying to know these things and so much more. I craved a glance inside the tabernacle. I was sure that if I could see inside even for an instant all my theological questions would be answered. I believed that if I could just be tall enough I would see the Jesus to whom I prayed every night. I was nowhere near tall enough, and I went home unsatisfied. But my desire to see Jesus remained with me for the whole day, and it even came back over and over again in the days that followed. It returned intensely every time my parents took me to Mass, until finally it became something that simply would not leave.
Perhaps this was a beginning.
Chapter I
A Boy from Jersey City
The Tale As Father Told It
I was born to this world a very long time ago, making my grand entrance in the hot summer of 1933 in Jersey City, New Jersey. Perhaps you don’t think that is an especially auspicious place to begin, but you’re dead wrong. It was the perfect place; it was the place that God chose for me, and something of it stays with me even now. I am proud to be a Jersey City boy, as anybody who knows me can tell you. I admit that Jersey City was not then, nor is it now, a particularly beautiful place, and I have often noted that parts of my hometown bear an uncanny resemblance to purgatory—the less desirable neighborhoods of purgatory, that is. But it was a good place to be as a child during the thirties and forties. It was filled with good people, most of them working class and a good number of them immigrants. The Irish abounded, as did Eastern European Jews. They were people of faith, and our town had its share of Catholic churches as well as synagogues. Both groups laughed and told jokes; they were people who seemed able to turn misfortune into humor, and that was something that I both loved and admired. The two groups got along very well—with minor and sometimes colorful exceptions. It was normal for me to hear animated conversations between people with pronounced Irish brogues and people who seemingly couldn’t get through a sentence without inserting at least one Yiddish word. By the time I started school my Yiddish vocabulary was moderately impressive, although somehow it never seemed to impress the sisters who taught us. Incidentally, I still make use of many of those words today.
My Jersey City roots run deep. My grandfather, August Groeschel, owned a tavern there, long before I was born. The members of my mother’s family—the Smiths—however, were foreigners. They came from Bayonne, New Jersey, a few miles away. All my brothers were born in Jersey City, just as I was. Sadly, my two sisters, the youngest in the family, were denied the privilege. By the time of their births we had moved to Caldwell, New Jersey, a very different sort of town—one with a different ethnic mix. It actually had Protestants, a breed that up to that time I had thought exotic.
There is a famous twentieth-century philosopher named Martin Heidegger, who for many years was very fashionable. Among other supposedly profound things, he used to say that we are “thrown” into our world, into our culture, into our families without any rhyme or reason. He was wrong—absolutely wrong. I know I was not “thrown” into my family arbitrarily—and neither were you. We were placed there lovingly. God prepared the right place for us in this life, just as He prepares a place for us in the next. He calls us forth at exactly the right moment, from precisely the right ancestral and chromosomal mix to make us the unique persons that we are—unique but linked in a very specific way to the past, to our ancestors, to the cultures that helped to form them. My family is part Irish and part Alsatian. Half my ancestors come from an island in the Atlantic, and half of them come from a landlocked province deep in the heart of Western Europe that has sometimes been French and sometimes German. Nothing connects those two places except their devout Catholic faith. Yet somehow God’s mysterious plan involved bringing my ancestors from those two unrelated places to the United Sates in search of a better life. He brought them to New York in the mid-1800s and then finally to New Jersey. Now there are Groeschels across this country.
The name, by the way, is of German origin, although it was altered a bit, probably through the influence of the French language. It comes from the word “groschen,” which means a small thin coin, perhaps something like a dime. It can also mean simply “small money.” In all likelihood my ancestors were among those who minted small coins back in Alsace. For many years I was the almoner of my Franciscan community, which means that I was the one whose duty it was to ask for money, to beg alms to support our work with the poor. I thought it amusing that the almoner should have a name that means a type of money, but I was always glad that no one took things literally and gave me a handful of dimes. “Small money,” on the other hand, was something else. I was always very moved when someone, usually an elderly person, would offer me a dollar or two for the poor. Often these people had only a little money themselves—barely enough to live on—and so I knew that the “small money” I was given by such people was really not small at all. It was a great and holy gift, and I always tried to treat it as such.
You probably are assuming by now that it is my father’s family that is Alsatian and that my mother’s family is Irish. Well, not exactly. Both my parents are half one and half the other, which is slightly odd, but true nonetheless. I guess we can say that they were well matched because of that. And they were. Perhaps that is at least part of the reason that their marriage was so good and so solid. My parents, by the way, loved me, and they loved all of my three brothers—Ned and Garry and Mark—and my two sisters—Marjule and Robin. They also loved each other. I make a point of saying that because such love does not always seem to be the case these days in families. It was considered very normal then, but many things that once seemed normal no longer do. My family was ordinary, if that can be said of any family. We were not given to pretensions, or—as the Irish would say—we didn’t put on airs. We lived in a modest home in a modest town. We did, however, have one illustrious relative on my mother’s Irish side, and he was a secret source of pride: Cardinal Logue, who was primate of Ireland during the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. He was also, according to many eye witnesses, one of the homeliest men in the country. The more I age, the more I become aware of the family resemblance. Besides Cardinal Logue, there was one particular