A Friar's Tale. John Collins
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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 moon in all her many phases. In fact, I’d often lose track of time and stay outside much 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