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 sports teams. Fr. Joseph Sheehan, who often taught apologetics to the senior class, doubled as the school’s 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