A Friar's Tale. John Collins
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