Article on Fr. Groeschel, CFR, in the NY Times

From a New York Times article:

A Circle of Faith Grows in Unexpected Ways

By PETER APPLEBOME

Forty-five years ago, the Rev. Benedict J. Groeschel had a small idea.

Then the chaplain at the Children’s Village for troubled youths in Dobbs Ferry in Westchester County, he decided in December 1962 to take Christmas dinner, other food and a smattering of presents to the impoverished families of five children from the South Bronx and Harlem whom he worked with.

Those families mentioned others — nephews, cousins, friends who were also in need. He thought: Why not? So next year the circle widened a bit. Word spread in the neighborhood. A building superintendent or neighbor would mention other names. Each December the list continued to grow.

Before long, he realized he had begun something that couldn’t be stopped, a Christmas tradition with a regular cast of characters, a past as well as a present, one of those reminders that the more noble notions of Christmas can sometimes creep in amid the seasonal clutter of commerce, bustle and noise.

Pick your religion, the essence of the season is the enormous things that can flow from small ones — a birth among the poor in a humble stable, a day’s worth of oil that somehow burns for eight.

And so, when Father Groeschel and his crew of helpers went to the South Bronx for the 45th year on Saturday, this time with around 700 boxes of food and thousands of presents, the message was not just about the importance of service to the poor. It was also about the huge things that can come from tiny ones.

“As a psychologist, I have to say I have a Santa Claus complex,” Father Groeschel said on Friday, the calm day between the loading and delivering of the food and toys and their distribution. “But I never, ever anticipated that this would become anything like this.”

Actually, there’s a second reason why this Christmas is so special. It’s a miracle he has lived to see it. Father Groeschel, an author of religious books and a fixture on the Roman Catholic EWTN television network, was crossing a street in Orlando, Fla., on Jan. 11, 2004, when he was hit by a car. He was near death three times in the next month, particularly on the night of the accident when he had no blood pressure, heartbeat or pulse for about 20 minutes. A few days later, he almost died from toxins that were overloading his system, then later from heart failure while on a respirator.

The accident left him without much use of his right arm and trouble walking, but he recovered to a degree almost no one expected.

“They said I would never live. I lived,” he said. “They said I would never think. I think. They said I would never walk. I walked. They said I would never dance, but I never danced anyway.”

Father Groeschel, a Franciscan friar who is the director of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York’s office of spiritual development, which assists priests, now presides over an ad-hoc partnership of the faithful for the Christmas operation.

In addition to hundreds of donors, it includes Teresa Catullo, a local woman who spends the entire year buying up hundreds of off-price toys and gifts, which clutter her house until packed and shipped off; Cathy Hickey, who has worked with him since 1986; Jim Hogg, who runs a homeless shelter in Bethlehem, Pa., but comes in every year to help load trucks and deliver the food and toys; and two women, Doris Reeves and Anne Duffy, who for the second year flew in from California to help out as needed.

“If we believe what we say we do, then we should put our words into action,” Mr. Hogg said. “The Bible says, ‘If you do this unto these, the least of my brethren, you have done it for me.’”

Father Groeschel, who is 74, with a long white beard that’s more Merlin than Santa, is considered liberal on social justice issues like poverty and immigration, and extremely orthodox on church issues like abortion and homosexuality.

He figures Christmas has long been in a struggle between the sacred and the temporal, between charity and marketing, tensions that are particularly out of whack now. But then that’s true in our society overall, where the notion of service to the poor that is the focus of the order he helped start seems as quaint as friars in cassocks.

“I’m the only person in Larchmont who wishes he lived in the South Bronx,” Father Groeschel said, in his home and office in what used to be a garage at the archdiocese’s Trinity Retreat House, overlooking a bay off Long Island Sound.

Still, there are consolations. On a frigid Friday, it feels astoundingly peaceful. There’s no television with the overheated cavalcade of daily astonishments in the news and the commercials for luxury cars with bows on top. Priests and fellows and helpers of various stripes pad quietly to and fro. For a moment, in this quiet corner of Westchester all is calm, all is bright.

Day Two at the NCDVD

Well day two is drawing to a close, and it has been a long one. Up early, we travelled from Baltimore to Emmitsburg, Maryland for Morning Prayer at Mount Saint Mary's Seminary. The drive was beautiful, as was the seminary and chapel. After morning prayer we were treated to a talk by Father Benedict Groeschel, CFR. For the most part Fr. Groeschel spoke abouth the errors that psychology has interjected into our faith, especially into our seminaries. I'll post my notes from his talk later, but the long and short of it was that striving to live a virtuous life was the answer, and that as vocations directors we should seek out men of virtue. The talk was very good, at times very funny, and as we've come to expect from Fr. Groeschel, brutally honest.

After the talk there was a holy hour in the chapel followed by Mass with Fr. Groeschel as homilist. After Mass I was able to get the picture above with Fr. Kyle Schnippel, Director of Vocations for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati and moderator of the Called By Name blog, Fr. Groeschel, and me. What a blessing! I should add here that it has been a blessing to meet Fr. Schnippel after months of comments and posts back and forth on each others blogs. Unfortunately due to the schedule and going in different directions we haven't really had a chance to talk, but I hope to tomorrow. What I can say is that the Archdiocese of Cincinnati is blessed to have Fr. Schnippel as their Director of Vocations.

Fr. Shlesinger and I had an opportunity to visit the National Shrine to Our Lady of Lourdes behind the seminary. It was really beautiful, and I can only say it should be a pilgrimage site for those in the mid-atlantic states.

From the Seminary we headed up the street to the Minor Basilica for the Shrine of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton. Truthfully I had know idea how impressive this Basilica was. This a pciture of the Sanctuary.

From the basilica we headed to Gettysburg. I'll spare you my interest in Civil War history. In short it was incredible to see the battlefield. It was strange to drive around a place were so many men gave their lives. Think about the fact that in three days 51,000 Americans were killed, wounded, captured or went missing! When I get back to Raleigh I'm going to watch Gettysburg again - it will certainly be different watching it now.

Tonight we went to an Orieles game at what has to be one of the nicest ballparks in the country. The game wasn't terrific, but then again when the weather is perfect, there's a full moon in the sky, you're at a baseball game, can it realy be bad?

More tomorrow.

Signs of Change

This will be my first year attending the National Conference of Diocesan Vocations Directors, and from what I understand you would have never seen a poster like this one ten years ago. Yes, the times do seem to be changing.

What's more, and perhaps what will be the highlight of the conference for me, is that Fr. Benedict Groeschel, CFR is one of this years key note speakers. As I posted below, Fr. Groeschel has very strong, and in my opinion correct, views about the state of vocations. Add to it the fact that he seems to be pulling less punches as he gets older, and you have the recipe for an outstanding talk. I can't wait to hear what he has to say.

The Life and Death of Religious Life

By Fr. Benedict Groeschel, CFR

from First Things Magazine

(June/July 2007)

It was a truism—universally accepted until the last decades of the twentieth century—that, wherever the Catholic Church was present, there would be representatives of the religious life: communities of vowed men and women living a frugal common life, praying and working together in Christian service, and offering a witness to the kingdom of God. They belonged to congregations that explicitly took on the responsibility of answering the gospel’s call to leave family, lands, and ownership to follow Jesus Christ.

Similar religious communities existed in smaller numbers in the Orthodox churches. Even today, many older people were taught, guided, and cared for by an impressive army of religious sisters, brothers, and priests. They numbered at least three hundred thousand in the United States on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, and their ranks were swelling. From Trappists to Jesuits, from cloistered Carmelites to Sisters of Charity, the religious could be found everywhere, celebrating the liturgy and common prayer, and frequently serving those with personal needs, especially the poor and the sick.

Most of these communities are now in a state of collapse, with the average age of members in the upper seventies, and no recruits in sight. My own experience offers a sad example. In 1951 I entered the Capuchin province of Detroit, which had almost seven hundred friars. The Capuchins were the fourth-largest religious order of men in the Church. They had produced such examples of sanctity in our time as Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, now declared a saint, and the Venerable Solanus Casey, who may soon be beatified. There were almost 150 friars in formation in the Detroit province when I joined. Today the province has fewer than a dozen men in formation.

Against that decline, one has to set the number of new communities that have appeared in recent years—made up of deeply dedicated men and women who are part of what has come to be known as the John Paul II generation. I belong now to a reform movement, founded by eight Capuchins and known as the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal. We currently have 115 friars and some twenty-five sisters. Because I was the first servant, or superior, of our community, many people ask me, “What are you doing to thrive in a wasteland?” Occasionally someone inquires, “What can we do to see religious life return?” I have thought much about these questions.
I had been a friar for two decades when I came across some work in psychological anthropology that made me suspect that religious life was beginning to go in the wrong direction. Serious cracks were already appearing in the structures and attitudes of many religious communities, even the largest and most respected. When I studied the book The Ritual Process, by the eminent psychological anthropologist Victor Turner, I was mesmerized by some of the anthropological components of religious life, which seem to have gone unrecognized in the endless discussion on how to make orders more relevant. I discovered, for instance, that religious life is older and wider than Christianity. Buddhist and Hindu forms of this life, with the basic disciplines of poverty, chastity, and obedience, had existed for hundreds of years before the first Christian bands of anchorites and cenobites went into the desert during the early centuries of persecution.

Following the example of such saints as Anthony of Egypt, Paul the Hermit, and Pachomius, an ex-soldier of the Roman legions, men and women took up the pursuit of the vowed life. An important but frequently overlooked variable of that life is a quality known as liminality—the state of being an outsider to the establishment of any society, even one with strong religious characteristics and values.

Liminality derives from the Latin limen (which means threshold or edge) and refers in this case to people who live beyond the accepted norms of the establishment. Obviously chastity, poverty, and obedience to a spiritual master or superior take a person out of any establishment where family life and inheritance are the norm. Such people as St. Benedict, St. Francis, and, in our time, Mother Teresa of Calcutta are obvious examples of liminal personalities. In fact, Turner spends much time on the study of liminality in the early days of the Franciscan Order.
Liminal people stand in sharp contrast even to virtuous members of the establishment. This dichotomy is not a bad thing, although there must always be a degree of liminality in any follower of Christ. We see this in the saintly members of royal families: St. Louis IX of France and St. Elizabeth of Hungary, for example, who wore the Franciscan habit beneath their royal finery and served the poor with zeal and joy. Anyone familiar with religious life at the time of its collapse knows that liminality was almost entirely lost—and remains lost, except for the new communities and a few older ones that have remarkably held the line.

If we ask, “What could have gone so wrong and caused such a decline in religious life?” we realize that this is a dull tale extending over a period of more than forty years. Yet it comes as no surprise to anyone who knows church history and understands anthropology. You cannot go against the laws of human nature reflected in psychological anthropology—even laws such as liminality that apply only to a select few—without disastrous results. The current tampering with family life and marriage is another example of foolish intervention into the laws of anthropology. Such endeavors are like trying to grow figs from thistles.

The collapse of the large religious orders of men and women in the Church can be attributed to a variety of factors that coalesced at the same time. The disaster has been well described by the well-known anthropologist Fr. Gerald Arbuckle, S.M., in two important books: Strategies for Growth in Religious Life and Out of Chaos: Reforming Religious Congregations. Religious life, Arbuckle argues, was drawn into the same cultural revolution that undermined family life and higher education in the late 1960s. Unfortunately, the Catholic religious, who had been taught not to think for themselves, followed like sheep. Many of the most strident voices, which demanded the removal of the foundations of religious life, departed after eviscerating the life and constitutions of their communities. Those who sincerely attempted to lead a spiritual life found themselves with little effective leadership.

I once heard a well-meaning and well-educated sister of a respected teaching order tearfully observe at a seminar, “We did what we were told to do.” The obvious question “Who told you?” must be asked. Christian religious are called without exception to lead a gospel life and follow the Scriptures and the traditions of the Fathers, the Church, and the saints. These sources, which were always there, were almost completely ignored. Instead, many shaky theories of psychology, most of them now gone over the waterfall of time, were substituted for the gospel and sacred teaching. Alien and awkward things were introduced into the spiritual life, some of them borrowed from totally misunderstood Asian traditions. We have only to look at the offerings of retreat houses run by some religious congregations to discover how silly people intending to be serious can sometimes become.

Along with this came the impact of psychotherapy, which as a result of the discoveries of Sigmund Freud focused almost entirely on undoing what were seen as repressive mechanisms in the personality. Contemporary positive psychology has rejected the general intellectual and emotional bankruptcy of this position. Although some people did get to feel better, they did not necessarily do better or come closer to their eternal goal. As one founder of positive psychology, Aaron Beck, has pointed out, there was an almost complete lack of common sense in psychotherapy from the 1940s to the 1980s.

The necessity of grace for the spiritual life was also ignored. Semipelagianism, or even full-blown pelagianism, practically denying the necessity of grace, was observable on all sides. Thus, for example, the widespread popularity of the therapy and pelagian assumptions of Carl Rogers, one of the creators of client-centered therapy, practically wiped out a large and respected congregation in California in a single summer.

On top of this, the two major underpinnings of Catholic religious life were seriously weakened in their presentation. The first was the credibility of Sacred Scripture. The rules of many religious orders say explicitly that they are founded on the gospel. As a result of skeptical and rationalistic criticism of the New Testament, the scriptural foundation of religious life was undercut. The rule of life of the Franciscan order, for example, is to observe the gospel—but if the popular scholars are telling us that Jesus didn’t do this, didn’t say that, didn’t mean the other thing, what are we to do?

There was also what Pope Benedict XVI has referred to as the “collapse” of liturgical life. The intellectually and spiritually impressive liturgical movement that was growing in the United States after the Second World War—a movement founded on insights cultivated in the Benedictine abbeys—gave way to a misunderstanding of the liturgy as primarily entertainment. The goal was to get everybody involved, but the question remains: Involved in what? In religious communities and parishes across America, liturgical committees were suddenly filled with people who had never studied anything of substance about the Church’s liturgy. Eminent liturgical writers such as Romano Guardini and Louis Bouyer deplored this popular and often well-intentioned debasing of the liturgy.

In addition, a general theological confusion prevailed in the 1970s and 1980s, undisciplined and unrestrained in nature, which deeply penetrated religious communities and seminaries. I am well aware of it because I was thrown out of four seminaries during those years for the offense of being a Catholic, even though I was only teaching pastoral counseling. This period of theological confusion has largely come to an end and is roundly rejected by today’s young candidates for religious life or the priesthood.

Finally, strange as it may seem, the ideas of Marxism, a philosophy that did untold damage to the lives of hundreds of millions of people, suddenly began to appear in religious communities during this era. I spoke to someone a few years ago who had attended the more avant-garde meetings of religious sisters. I asked what the main topic of conversation was. I was flabbergasted when I was told that it was the teachings of Friedrich Engels. (Poor Engels never thought that the last people to take him seriously would be Catholic nuns who had gone off the rails.)

Religious life will either reform or disappear. There remain, of course, a few stalwart communities that clung to their identity and purpose through the dark times. They are easily identified now because they have novices and postulants, and some of them are thriving.
The more interesting phenomenon is the creation of new communities largely out of the ruins of older ones—more interesting, because it means that an entirely new approach to religious life is not necessary or even desirable. Instead, new communities can be built on the foundations of older ones by taking rejected traditions and bringing them back to life. It also means that a return to the ideals of an order’s founder and embracing the charism that had been granted through that founder (rather than dubious late-twentieth-century interpretations) can prove the difference between survival and extinction. One example of a thriving new community that is both original and traditional is Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. Most others, like my own, grow out of the past.

Is there any hope for the older communities that are now in a state of collapse? There are so many of these that a statistical probability suggests that a few will regain their purpose and experience new life. But, so far, there is no obvious example of a community that, having gone into severe decline, later underwent a reform allowing it to regain its vitality. The few thriving older communities never lost their identity. It is wonderful to hope that out of the chaos and debris some voices may be raised that will preserve some of the older communities. My own community experienced considerable resistance when we first attempted to reform within the jurisdiction of the Capuchin Order. There seems to be more openness now to possible reform.
In particular, the new communities must be careful not to make the same mistakes as the older ones. They must teach and encourage people to think for themselves without being disobedient. They must try to discuss and find a consensus within the community concerning what they do. Otherwise there will be a return of the widespread resentment that characterized religious both on the eve of Vatican II and later, when changes were forced on them. There must be an authentic and prayerful return to and respect for the following of the gospel. Finally, the anthropological signs of religious life identified by Turner and Arbuckle must be maintained: Common life, frugality, identifiable uniform dress of a religious nature (a habit), and a common apostolic work shared by all members of the community are things one must look for. Otherwise, there is no hope of a community’s revival.

A surprising and welcome development at the present time is the emergence of a whole wave of young men and women interested in authentic religious life. They provide proof of the ongoing presence of God’s grace—as well as the validity of the anthropological theory of liminality. These young people surprise us by their willingness to join even communities beset by obvious theological confusion and little observance of their traditional rule. If they manage to survive for twenty years, the appearance of the sinking communities may change. In some communities there is an absurd phenomenon similar to a theological sandwich: The youngest and the oldest, who are in agreement, are like slices of bread. The age group in the middle reminds us of mayonnaise.

Something in human nature has been calling people to religious life for thousands of years—and gospel teaching and church tradition have aimed this human hunger at a strong form of Christian dedication. We should have learned by the disastrous experience of the twentieth century that we cannot afford the luxury of frivolous attempts at silly spirituality and self-seeking. We cannot continue to be misled by untested and unscientific sociological and psychological theories.

There hardly seems a mistake that religious orders did not make. Corruptio optimi pessimum, the old Latin proverb runs: Corruption of the best becomes the worst. We have seen it for forty years. The generation formed since John Paul II became pope is clamoring for something better.

Favorable NY Times Article on Fr. Groeschel, CFR

By Abby Gruen/New York Times
(emphasis mine)

SEVEN men stood singing a medieval hymn in a moonlit chapel here on a recent Sunday night. The Rev. Benedict J. Groeschel, disabled since a near fatal bus accident three years ago, sat with his cane by his side, and led the group in prayer. “Watch over me during this night,” he read.
The men had gathered at the Trinity Retreat House, operated by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York as a place for clergy to study and pray. Father Groeschel, a 73-year-old friar who wears a gray habit, has been praying in this simple chapel for 33 years. When he was younger he would sometimes pray all night here.

“I wanted to live in the South Bronx with the poor,” said Father Groeschel, who teaches pastoral psychology at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, “but I couldn’t say no when Cardinal Cooke asked me to head the Office of Spiritual Development here.”

Father Groeschel lives in a converted garage next to the retreat house, in a cell-like bedroom that looks out on the Long Island Sound. Beneath his long white beard and kind demeanor is a wise-cracking, street-smart Jersey boy who is unafraid of ruffling feathers. He preaches orthodox Catholicism in the retreats he leads around the world, on his popular show on the Catholic cable network, and in the three dozen religious books he has written — forums in which he is well known for outspoken attacks on hypocrisy, bureaucratic complacency and the news media.

In his book “From Scandal to Hope,” about the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, he calls the coverage in The Boston Globe, The New York Times and The San Francisco Chronicle anti-Catholic and unfair. He questions why Catholic priests were singled out over clergy of other denominations who may have committed sexual improprieties and says that many of the allegations were ambiguous or unsubstantiated. “Seldom in the history of journalism have I seen such virulent attacks on any institution that is supposed to receive fair treatment in the press,” he writes.

Father Groeschel was particularly incensed by criticism leveled at Pope John Paul II, whose strict faith inspired Father Groeschel and seven colleagues to break away from the Capuchin order of friars and form a new religious order in 1987. The order, the Franciscan Friars and Sisters of the Renewal, now has 135 members, who dedicate their lives to serving the poor. “Love the poor and your life will be filled with sunlight and you will not be afraid in the hour of your death” is one of Father Groeschel’s favorite quotations from St. Vincent de Paul.

The Trinity Retreat House was in the news last August when the archdiocese decided to place priests there who had been accused of sexual abuse. The plan was scuttled when nearby residents complained. After the one priest who was sent to the retreat house left, Father Groeschel held a holiday open house for his neighbors in this wealthy waterfront enclave, many of whom had never met him before.

Father Groeschel first came to Westchester in 1960 to be chaplain at the Children’s Village, a home for troubled boys, in Dobbs Ferry. He immediately became involved in an ecumenical group working to support civil rights. “Probably the most beautiful and moving thing I’ve been involved in was the civil rights movement,” he said. “It was the most interesting and creative period of my life.”

Father Groeschel and a rabbi in Croton-on-Hudson had raised the money to buy the blue station wagon that Michael Schwerner was driving when he, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman were kidnapped and later killed by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi in 1964.
Father Groeschel remembers going to a civil rights march with his friend Nate Schwerner, Michael’s father, before the young men were found and Mr. Schwerner’s saying to him, “I think they are dead.”

During his 14 years at the Children’s Village, Father Groeschel got his Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University and became a therapist. He also taught at Fordham and worked at Manhattanville College.

“He had humility even as a young priest,” said Valerie Moore O’Keeffe, 64, the Mamaroneck town supervisor, who met Father Groeschel when she was a freshman at Manhattanville. “When people went to confession to him, he didn’t give stock answers out of a moral theology book. He was respectful of the story they were telling him.”

On a recent Saturday, Father Groeschel spoke about current social and political issues, including abortion, at the annual Divine Mercy Conference of the archdiocese, attended by more than a thousand people at Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains.

Since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, fighting abortion is a top priority for Father Groeschel, who has made it a point of praying outside abortion clinics when he can. He was arrested in 1995 for praying in the driveway of the Women’s Medical Pavilion, a Dobbs Ferry clinic that offered abortions, where demonstrators on both sides of the abortion issue protested weekly for decades until it was closed in 2002.

The church’s views on issues like abortion and homosexuality put Father Groeschel on the opposite side of the political spectrum from many who support his work for social justice.
“I used to be a liberal, if liberal means concern for the other guy,” Father Groeschel said. “Now I consider myself a conservative-liberal-traditional-radical-confused person.”

His old friend Mrs. O’Keeffe doesn’t see any contradiction.
“If you knew the man all along, you just see a human being developing from one place to another,” she said. “His basic simplicity, intelligence and love of people has never changed. He’s still clothing the poor and feeding the hungry.”