Thomas H. Groome

An influential thinker and author of more than two hundred essays, articles, and books on religious instruction, Professor of Theology and Religious Education Thomas H. Groome is retiring after fifty years at Boston College. Groome, director of BC’s PhD in Theology and Education program, earned his reputation on his own terms: A laicized Catholic priest, he is critical of the requirement of clerical celibacy, favors the ordination of women, and advocates for LGBTQ inclusion in church life. We asked him what he’s learned in his life and career.

You can choose your path at any age. I grew up in a village in Ireland. I was nine when I walked into the kitchen and said, “Mom, I think I’ll become a priest.” She was taken aback. But I was the youngest of ten kids and had an older brother, Bernard, I greatly admired. He was a priest and my role model. I wanted to be like him.

You can choose a new path at any age, too. I was in the priesthood for almost twenty years when I met a wonderful woman. This happened just before I left for an Ignatian retreat of intense spiritual exercise. It was a discernment process that asked, “Are you doing what you want and should be doing with your life?” My director, George, kept asking me this, and I’d say, “I’m great! I love being a priest.” But about midway through the retreat, I said, “George, you know what? I’ve been lying to myself and to you.” I didn’t want to live a celibate life. I resigned priesthood, was married in a Catholic church, and the rest is history. Resigning was a huge struggle for me, because I loved what priests do. But in many ways, I went on doing what priests do.

To love is divine. I think God’s favorite way of reaching out to us is through other people, people who love across the spectrum: the loving commitment of spouses to each other, the love of a child for parents, and so on. We’re invited to respond to God’s love, and that response is through the ordinary and the everyday. It’s not rarefied. It’s not magical. It’s rather pedestrian. To me, the best possible way to live life is with a commitment to a God who is love, and who is in love with you. I say to my students, the alternative is so bankrupt, so minimal. It’s a great blessing to have faith of that kind and try to live it, because without that, life becomes absurd.

How you teach matters as much as what you teach. When I started to put together a pedagogy, a way of teaching, the influence of Paulo Freire was very heavy on it. Freire wanted to craft a pedagogy that would raise people’s critical consciousness, especially around issues of justice. I began to think about how to bring that kind of pedagogy into religious education. You start by talking to people about their life and interests. Jesus did this all the time. When he said that the reign of God is like women making bread, I bet he was talking to women making bread.

Free will is a cornerstone of religious education. People are entitled to their own discernment and should listen to their own hearts. Rather than simply mouthing what they’re supposed to say, they’ve got to genuinely speak their own words. There are a number of examples from the Gospels where disciples rejected what Jesus was saying, and Jesus accepted their position. Respecting that choice is, I think, the best way to be faithful to the Gospel. 

There are some things you can never understand. I’ll never understand human suffering. I’ve had some in my own life. I just found out that I have prostate cancer. I’ve gone through, hopefully, a very effective program of radiation. But when something like that happens, you stand back and say, “Why?” You can’t say it’s the will of God. God’s as disappointed and disgusted with this cancer as I am. But why didn’t God step in? I’ll never be able to reconcile this tender, loving, merciful God with the reality of human suffering and injustice.

Faith goes hand in hand with justice. The Christian faith, if it has any connection or grounding whatsoever in Jesus of Nazareth, has to be committed to compassion, to justice, to mercy. It’s what he preached throughout his whole life. He was constantly feeding hungry people and welcoming all. Everybody was included. Sinners. Prostitutes. Tax collectors. Jesus crafted this centrality of compassion and care for the downtrodden, the excluded, the marginalized. That’s the central theme of the Gospel, and there’s no way around that, although we’ve forgotten it and taught otherwise and done otherwise. ◽