Letters

‘Ideal Franciscan’

Posted

To the Editor:

We first knew each other when he was about 18 and I was two years older, he a Capuchin seminarian and I a newly professed Capuchin Brother. Even then, poor and marginalized people were top priority for Father Benedict Joseph Groeschel, C.F.R., and remained so for the rest of his long and ministerially fruitful life. He was a holy and ideal Franciscan who went to the Lord Oct. 3, a Franciscan feast commemorating the death of St. Francis of Assisi, called the Transitus. Already I am calling upon his intercessory power before God, seeking spiritual and material favors.

Here’s a brief story typical of Father Benedict’s life. As a seminarian his brother friars noticed that every evening he would come to the kitchen begging for leftover food. We wondered why, so one evening some friars followed him clandestinely from the kitchen down a winding road on the friary grounds, to railroad tracks that ran parallel to the Hudson River in Garrison. There waiting for him were homeless men, whom Seminarian Benedict would feed. He was feeding the hungry poor, marginalized children of God even then, identical to the work he would do the rest of his life. 

Father Benedict was one of the greatest Franciscan priests I have ever known, and I have known some holy ones, like Venerable Solanus Casey, O.F.M. Cap., whose Masses I served as a very young man. In my opinion Father Benedict is right up there with saints like Father Solanus and I feel privileged to have lived in the same friary with him, to have “rubbed shoulders,” so to speak, with a priest I consider to be a saint.

Bruce Snowden

Bronx