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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 group of my relatives who impressed me greatly when I was a boy, and I thought about them a lot. There were five boys in this family in Ireland and each one of them became a priest. I wondered why God would cluster so many vocations in one family, and I wondered if He would do it in mine. From the time I was seven I knew I wanted to be ordained, and I would sometimes imagine that after I entered the seminary my three younger brothers would follow me one by one. That wasn’t to happen, of course, and my long-ago relatives in Ireland still hold a seemingly unassailable record for number of priests produced in the family.

I already mentioned that I was called Peter. In fact, nobody ever called me anything else until well after I entered the Capuchins. But Peter is not the name I was given, at least it’s not all of it. I was baptized Robert Peter Groeschel, which I think has a rather nice ring to it. But within days of my birth I lost the Robert part. It happened when my parents took me to the home of my Aunt Pauline and Uncle Jack Decker—presumably to show me off (I was a good deal cuter then than I am now). They were the parents of my cousin Julie, who at the time was a little more than two years old. It seems she couldn’t master Robert Peter. In fact, she got it hopelessly tangled and eventually managed to confuse it with Peter Rabbit. No one could get her to straighten things out. Finally, the adults gave in and I became simply Peter. I am convinced that I belong to a very small minority group: people who have been named by toddlers.

I was a very fortunate boy in that I had a father worth emulating. Because of widespread divorce and a host of other factors, many young men today have no real father figure in their lives. This makes life much more difficult for a boy than it has to be. As a psychologist, and especially during my years at Children’s Village, I saw how the lives of fatherless boys are frequently troubled in various ways and sometimes even irreparably damaged. Such boys often spend many years guessing at how a man should act, at what a man should be. My brothers and I, however, were blessed with a fine father. Edward Joseph Groeschel was a good and solid man, the kind of man who seemed made to be a dad, to be a provider. He was an engineer by profession, and if you’ve ever seen the United Nations Building or Madison Square Garden, you’ve seen his handiwork—not that he was totally responsible for either, of course, but his work was vital to each. When I was very little I decided that I would be an engineer, too, just like him. That idea didn’t last very long. I soon became distracted by the local fire department and decided I would spend my life fighting blazes rather than building buildings. It was really the fire pole that entranced me. Even cranes and bulldozers couldn’t hold a candle to sliding down that shiny pole in answer to a clanging fire alarm. That idea didn’t last long either.

I feel as if my father was always present in our lives when I was little. Yet, in fact, he was rarely there. He would leave home early in the morning, making sure to catch the 6:00 a.m. bus, and he wouldn’t return until six in the evening. He was often tired when he came home, but never too tired for his children, and certainly never too tired to regale us with stories about what had gone on that day. Dad was a true raconteur, a man who could keep a group of kids rolling on the floor with laughter. I learned many things from him, not the least of which is that you can often make an important point with humor far better than you can by other means. From him I also learned what it means to be dedicated, what it means to know what your true duty is, and to do it. As the eldest son in the family, I usually sat next to him at Sunday Mass, and during that time I was very aware of his deep, yet simple, faith. It seemed to radiate from him but in a very quiet, almost imperceptible way as he knelt, his head bowed, his missal in his hand. If I had never been told by anyone that the Mass was an incomparably sacred event, I would have known it from glancing at my father. I could see that for him faith was real, tangible. For many years after my mother’s death, my father used to say, “I can’t wait to get the hell to heaven.” Part of the reason for this rather colorful expression is because he missed my mother so much and he wanted to be with her again, but part of it is simply because of his faith, his unshakable trust in the promises Christ made to us all. My father collapsed one day as he was walking home from Mass and spent the next three weeks in a coma before death took him. It has always been a source of great comfort to me to know that among his last conscious acts was the reception of Communion. That was a gift from God, and I have always been thankful for it. I was blessed in the father God gave me, and I know it; I have always been thankful for that, as well. I still miss him, but I know I will again be in his presence, and that of my mother, in whatever time God chooses.

We had the old-fashioned sort of family. You know the kind: it had a father who provided for everybody and a mother who cared for everybody. My parents really knew how to make that situation work—which was fortunate, considering that they had six children to bring up. As I look back at them I am filled with gratitude and even amazement. I can still remember my father and mother sitting at the dining room table with all the monthly bills spread out in front of them. They would discuss when each was to be paid, and then my mother, in her elegant handwriting, would write a series of checks and pass them one by one to my father to sign. It was a monthly ritual, and to me it seemed like nothing more than that. As I look back at it now, I realize that they must have had to be very careful with their money to provide for us all as well as they did.

My mother had countless friends. She knew everybody and everybody knew her. I think you could have parachuted her into Outer Mongolia and she would have run into somebody she knew in the first ten minutes. She was always called Marjule, but technically her name was Margaret Julia, which is the name on her baptismal certificate. Marjule was simply a name my grandmother came up with as a way to honor both her sisters, Margaret and Julia. I’ve always liked the name, and I loved my mother. My sister bears that name now and it is being passed down from one generation of Groeschels to the next. That is a fact that pleases me greatly. I suspect it pleases my mother as she looks down on her descendants from heaven.

I think I learned a great deal from my mother. As a child I had a window into her world in a way that I never did into my father’s. He was always away at work, but she was always present. In fact, she was a real presence, a powerful personality and a kindly one. My sister—the one who bears my mother’s name—once said of our mother that “she was so down to earth she was in the earth.” I like that, and I think it is very true. It sums up our mother in a very succinct and accurate way. She was highly intelligent and had an innate capability when it came to nearly anything. Give her a problem and she’d give you its solution in nearly record time. Things seemed to come easily to her. She was always busy, always involved in one project or another. As I look back after so many years, I can see that I have inherited at least some of my mother’s traits, including a love of being with people and a need to keep involved. For most of my life I wasn’t satisfied unless I had several irons in the fire at the same time, a number of different and often unrelated projects all going on simultaneously, and all in various stages of completion. My mother was like that—although I must admit I am more intensely so. She was president of the Rosary Altar Society. She drove regularly for the Red Cross. When my sisters were old enough to be Girl Scouts, she was their troop leader. She was involved in not one, but five different bridge groups. As a result of this she regularly hosted quite a large number of bridge-playing ladies at our house, employing my sisters (in their best dresses, of course) as waitresses. Yet she was deeply involved in the lives of her children. Her family always came first, and this is something from which we all benefited.

My father’s work meant that we had to move several times during my childhood, as one engineering project was completed and the next—which might be a hundred miles away—was ready to begin. This could be difficult for children, but my parents always made it seem easy and non-threatening. One good thing about it was that the men who worked with my dad and their families would all be moving at the same time. So we had a ready-made community of sorts. It was something like a traveling family—not a traveling circus, although at times it might have looked like one, but a traveling family. During all those moves my mother was the de facto leader of the group. She was the organizer and the morale officer. She would arrange things and have all the wives help each other and the children. She did this work well, in part because she had the enviable trait of being comfortable in almost any situation. She also treated everyone exactly the same way, from the most prestigious person to the least. I remember that when my mother drove for the Red Cross and would pick up people in lower income areas she would talk to them the same way she would talk to the mayor’s wife. Everyone was equal in her eyes. That was something that made a deep impression on me. In a way, it was an expression of faith, whether my mother realized it or not. We are all made in God’s image. We are all important to our heavenly Father. Our Divine Savior died for each one of us. My mother might not have articulated things that way, but she didn’t have to. She simply lived that truth, and as the old saying goes: “Actions speak louder than words.”

At one point, several years after I left New Jersey and soon after I began my seminary training in Garrison, New York, a town that is not terribly far from my parents’ home, my family came to visit me. It was a wonderful visit. I can remember my youngest brother, Mark, happily climbing some of the huge old trees on the seminary property as I sat talking to my mother and father. My two young sisters were taking turns sitting in my lap and playing with my Capuchin-style beard, which was something that seemed to hold endless fascination for them. Apparently, though, at some time during that visit one of the Capuchin superiors told my parents and my brothers and sisters that they were no longer my family, that now the Capuchins were. His words were not meant to be cruel; they were simply an expression of the way religious life was understood at that time, but they must have hurt my family and especially my mother and father deeply. Yet my parents still supported me, never tried to stand in the way of God’s will for their son, even if that will involved a sense of loss for them. There is only one word for that: love.

I’m a sisters’ boy, and that’s a fact of which I am very proud. Aside from my family, the religious sisters who educated me from first grade straight through high school (with the exception of only one year) probably had the most influence on my early life—even greater than that of priests, because in those days the contact was greater. I consider it a real tragedy that today’s Catholic children often have few occasions to be in the presence of religious sisters. I know that many of the lay teachers in Catholic schools these days do a fine job. Yet it is still an enormous loss that the sisters are, for the most part, gone, and that the children are denied the opportunity to be in the daily presence of someone who has dedicated her entire life to Christ. I pray every day for the rebirth of our great religious communities of women, and I urge my readers to do the same.

When I was a boy—even in first or second grade—I think that I could sense that many of the sisters had an indefinable quality, one that most of the laypeople I knew did not. Of course, I didn’t understand it then and certainly couldn’t have articulated it, but it seemed to me that the sisters were aware of (or maybe even in touch with) something out of the ordinary, even as they went about the business of daily life. Perhaps this feeling was simply a child’s response to their rather dramatic physical presence, to their flowing habits that always rustled softly as they walked, to the musical clinking of the rosary beads that were always hanging from their belts—rosary beads that were much longer and more impressive than the ones lay-people used. But perhaps it was more. Perhaps I was being granted a tiny glimmer of understanding concerning the quiet joy and peace that can reside in the heart of a dedicated religious. I can’t say for sure what it really was, especially after so many years, but I can say very definitely that even now I treasure my memories of those sisters.

One such recollection in particular remains with me. When I was in high school, I would attend the 7:00 a.m. Mass at St. Aloysius Church in Caldwell, New Jersey, nearly every day. I usually got there early, a few minutes before the Dominican sisters who taught in the parish school did; and so I would be in my seat as the door opened and the sisters entered, one by one in a long, silent line, the gaze of each sister cast down meditatively as she walked. As they made their way up the center aisle their habits looked so perfectly white that the sisters seemed to brighten, even to illuminate, the dimly lit church with their arrival. It was as if they bore the light of Christ with them—and perhaps they did. I was fascinated as each one of them genuflected gracefully and reverently before entering their pews at the front of the church, and I was almost envious of what seemed to me to be their perfect focus on the altar, their great awareness of the presence of our Divine Savior among us during the Mass. I came to realize deep in my heart that those sisters possessed something that was very beautiful, something that I desired to possess, as well. Gradually this desire grew and grew until it almost became an ache.

Now, I know the skeptics among my readers will be quick to say that I have greatly romanticized this recollection, endowing it over the years with qualities that the original events never possessed and could never possess. Perhaps that is true, but it is not really the point. The point is that the sisters who taught me had a profound influence on my life, not just as teachers, but as religious. Although I didn’t understand it, even when I was in high school, they were showing me a way of life, helping me to develop my vocation. I have always believed that God was using them to draw me not just to His priesthood, but to the religious life.

There were few male religious for me to observe and emulate at that point, although I knew many fine diocesan priests. It was the sisters who made clear to me the potential joys of a life dedicated to Christ through the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience. For this great gift I will be forever grateful to the Dominican Sisters of Caldwell and the Sisters of Charity of Saint Elizabeth, Convent Station, New Jersey. Without them my life would have been very different and, I believe, much diminished.

The sisters, however, gave me more than just a window into the life of prayer and adoration, for the ones I knew as a boy were members of active religious communities, not contemplatives, and they were very devoted to their apostolates. They were always real people too. Some were quite vivacious. A number of them could be very funny when they wanted to be. And, of course, a couple of them could be rather tough. Thus at an early age I was able to see what it meant to combine a life of faith and dedication to God with—let us say—the more ordinary and even earthbound things of life. They taught me early and well that the Christian life is the full life, that it combines the interior and the exterior in a truly balanced way, and that it is within this careful balance that most of us are called to live.

I have often said that a Christian who spends enormous amounts of time in prayer—even someone who claims to feel the presence of God in his life at nearly every moment—but who somehow ignores the needs of those around him has missed the boat in a very serious way. Our love for Christ is not real, and can even be called an illusion, unless it overflows into a love for others. True love of Christ never exists in a vacuum; love of Christ and love of neighbor are two sides of the same coin and can never be completely separated. One of the most dramatic events of my early life demonstrated this overflow of love to me in a way that has stayed with me to this very day.

I have told this story many times before, so I will not repeat it fully here. If you want to know every detail, I suggest you refer to my book entitled Travelers Along the Way, in which I treated it at some length. In fact, it forms the beginning of that book, because it was an important beginning for me. The story concerns my second grade teacher, Sr. Teresa Maria, a Sister of Charity of Convent Station, New Jersey. She truly was a woman of great charity, not to mention a woman of great faith. In fact, Sr. Teresa Maria was, in my estimation, one of those quiet and hidden saints whom God sometimes places in our paths as we make our journey through life.

At the age of seven I was an avid people watcher, as many children are. I noticed what the adults around me were doing and tried to figure out why they were doing it. One day I noticed that Sr. Teresa Maria did something unusual. She left by herself after school, carrying a box. I wondered about that since the sisters usually went out two by two and rarely carried anything. A few days later I saw that she did the same thing; then she did it again and again, always heading in exactly the same direction. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, so I decided to make it my mission to find out. (My father had been reading to me from a book that had a title something like The Boy’s Book of Great Detective Stories. It had convinced me that I had the makings of a Sherlock Holmes—or at least a Hercule Poirot.) The next time sister appeared with her mysterious box I, the great detective, followed her, taking care that she didn’t see me.

Sister walked to a rundown building, very different from the places in which people I knew lived, and I peered through the window to discover her taking a tray of food out of the box and placing it on a table. In the room with her was the person to whom she was giving the food: a woman so misshapen and ugly that to my seven-year-old mind she could be only one thing—a witch. I had recently seen my very first movie, Walt Disney’s Snow White. There was a frightening witch in the movie, and to me the woman in the room looked just like her. The “witch” glanced up, and for an instant our eyes met through the grimy windowpane. In the next instant I was running for my life, and I continued to run until I reached the parish church, the place I thought would be most safe. I slowed down when I stepped inside (I had to: I was winded, and, of course, I knew you never ran in church), but I made my way as quickly as I reasonably could to our Blessed Mother’s altar, where I fell to my knees begging her to protect me from the witch, who—for all I knew—was waiting for me outside the church doors.

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.