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 from which Pete Groeschel was remarkably free at a surprisingly young age. He discovered early on that he was at 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