http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/features/f0000548.shtml 'I loved jail. Best days of my life!' Rory Fitzgerald talks to the charismatic American friar about faith, protest and his near-death experience 2 April 2010 Fr Benedict Groeschel has been around the block once or twice. He recalls being an eight-year-old New Jersey boy back in 1941: "I remember coming down the stairs and hearing Roosevelt's voice booming on the radio: '...and so I have asked Congress for a declaration of war!'" In the 1960s, as a young friar, he was very active in the American Civil Rights movement, which he calls "probably the most beautiful and moving thing I've been involved in". In 1987 he founded the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal in the South Bronx, New York. The order has thrived and has travelled east across the Atlantic: the friars are now established in Bradford, London, Limerick and Derry. Now 76, he is a familiar face to Catholics throughout the world as the affable host of his own weekly television show Sunday Night Live on EWTN. In 2004, a life that had seen many experiences changed in seconds when he was struck by a car in Orlando, Florida. He died: there's no other word for it. For 27 minutes he had no heartbeat, no blood pressure and no vital signs. After 10 minutes the medics gave him up for dead, but his companions pleaded with them to keep on trying to resuscitate him. After another 15 minutes, they succeeded. In the course of his recovery, he suffered a massive heart attack and veered close to death many more times. Yet only a few months after this ordeal, he started hosting his own live satellite television show. He walks with a cane now, but his mind is as agile as ever: "They said I would never live. I lived. 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." In the 1960s he was arrested for protesting for civil rights. He met Martin Luther King and was "very impressed by him, and what he did". More recently he was jailed for protesting against abortion: "I loved being in jail. Best five days of my life!" he says. In one sense, President Obama's election represented the ultimate vindication of the civil rights movement, yet Fr Groeschel had conflicted feelings: "I was very happy to see a black man elected as President; but I was very unhappy about his ideas on life. People don't know that there was a Catholic tradition of civil rights in Chicago. Obama, when he was growing up, was part of that. We are very disappointed that he came out as he did. Initially he was pro-life, but unfortunately he turns out to be rather pragmatic." Of his own political views he says: "I used to be a liberal, if liberal means concern for the other guy... Now I consider myself a conservative-liberal-traditional-radical-confused person." Noting the approach of St Patrick's Day - we're speaking just days before the feast - he says: "don't be deceived by the name: I'm half Irish. My people are from Donegal and Tipperary. In fact, my great-grand-uncle was Cardinal Logue. He was known as the ugliest man in the world. Somebody once asked him if he was the ugliest person alive, and he said to them, 'you should see my sister'." I ask whether he has any advice for the Irish Church in its current crisis. He jokes: "It's a very unwise thing, to ever tell the Irish what to do." As regards the Irish abuse issue, I mention that there is a widely perceived failure by the Irish bishops to communicate humility and contrition, and that this is turning people away from the Church in Ireland. As to suggestions that it would be a powerful symbolic act if a bishop were to wash the feet of a forgiving victim, he says: "If one of the bishops wanted to do that, it would be very impressive... The Archbishop of Dublin, who had nothing to do with the whole situation, as he was in Rome, might be the best person to do it. "Not that I want to suggest to the archbishop what he's supposed to do..." "I thought that [the abuse cover-up scandal] crept up on [the Irish bishops] out of the dark. I am completely astonished by the whole thing. I think what happened, sociologically, is when you have a very unified country it's difficult to challenge various segments of society. In America, you have a pluriform society where you have many different religions, philosophies, and people arguing back and forth. If somebody makes a big mistake, the others are going to find it out, right off the bat. I think nobody, anybody ever went on a mission to keep this whole thing a secret, but it grew like that because there was no external challenging of the Irish Church. "I attended a meeting of all the Irish bishops in Knock [recently], and I must say they were a very impressive group of people because they did not come on, any of them, like lords of the manor. The whole feeling of them was [that they were] very down to earth, as I would expect Irish people to be." He feels that "the Irish people are yearning for a clear statement of the faith", and says that the Church in Ireland "had it too easy" for long time. Fr Groeschel is the author of over 30 books. In one of his more recent, Tears of God, he quotes Einstein as saying: "My religion consists of 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." Einstein's words stand in flat contradiction to the impression Richard Dawkins likes to give, namely that Einstein was an atheist, "[Dawkins] is completely dishonest on that," says Fr Groeschel, who discerns something sinister about Richard Dawkins: "He appears to be an intelligent man, and to make such stupid statements, he must be twisted around by something... Absolutely, positively and explicitly, [Einstein's] own writing shows this beautiful believer in God, with the greatest respect for Christ. I grew up near where Einstein lived. Several local priests talked to Einstein about the Blessed Sacrament. He loved to talk about the Blessed Sacrament. It's just a theory, but I think it was because the Catholic theology speaks of transubstantiation, and the discovery of nuclear power is also a type of transformation." Fr Groeschel is a trained psychologist and this has formed a part of his ministry. Analysing himself, he admits to having a "Santa Claus Complex." Every Christmas he and the friars bring over 700 boxes of food and thousands of presents to poor families in the Bronx. He started that tradition back in 1962. They also give gifts and food at Easter: "I've got a garage full of chocolate rabbits at the moment." He sees psychology as a potentially useful tool for Christians: "Any tool can be used to do good or bad. If you have a hammer, it can be very helpful to build a house, but you can also use it to hit somebody over the head. You see? And it's the same with religion. Religion can be used badly or well." As to understanding other faiths, he notes that "when the Pope met the different religious leaders in New York: Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, a whole crowd of 'em, he began his statement with the first person plural pronoun: 'we'." "It was astonishing. A pope speaks to the representatives of the world's religions and he says 'we must stand together for human dignity and for the law of God'. We. How do ya like that one? We." As to what brought the friars to Britain and Ireland, he says: "We don't like to get too comfortable." He is delighted at the success of the friaries in Limerick, Derry and London and Bradford. He speaks well of the Muslim community the friars have encountered in Bradford. He notes the significance of St Francis's meeting with Muslims in Egypt in 1219, but says that most Muslims "don't know about St Francis; you have to rely on a kindly greeting". But he is pessimistic about the future of Christian Europe: "Europe is dying. It's not going to be atheist. It's going to be Muslim; with a noisy Catholic minority... I've always enjoyed Europe, the philosophers, the thinkers, the Catholic intelligentsia, but it's over." Conversely, he feels that the United States is likely to experience a renewal of the Christian faith: "The old liberal Catholics from the 1970s are all dying off. Over here, there's hardly a Catholic who's under 30 who's a liberal, and not a conservative. "In fact I've never met one. And if I do, I'll put him in a bell jar and take him to the national museum so everybody can go take a look at him! Over here, it's the young people who are full of energy and enthusiasm for the Catholic faith. We've had 15 vocations this year in New York alone. The average age of our friars is about 32, something like that." "The United States was the first country in the world that did not recognise a particular religion, but the Christian religion is very strong here. And I think it's growing stronger all the time." To what does he attribute the success of the friars of the Renewal? All you have to do is turn up looking like an ad for the Middle Ages and people will open up to you," he says. "In the depths of the human heart there is a yearning to do God's will."
