Inner-City Friars

In a 2005 book about the order, "A Drama of Reform," its chief founder, the Rev. Benedict Groeschel, complained that most Catholic orders in the English-speaking world were "lost in the woods," and that some are even "filled with dissent from official Church teaching."

"The old proverb is relevant here: 'If the trumpeter sounds an uncertain note, who will follow?' " wrote Groeschel, who once was arrested for praying in the driveway of an abortion clinic.

Sudano's path to the Newark monastery passed through St. John's University and, 30 years ago, a CBS newsroom.

Working as a CBS desk assistant, he said, he came to believe that the world's problems too often involved people making bad choices. Rather than help a network report on these bad choices, he wanted to spend his life helping people stop making them, he said.

After a year teaching at a Catholic school in White Plains, N.Y., he joined the Capuchin order. In time, he said, he became frustrated, believing that the friars spent too much time running churches and not enough time helping the poor.

Sudano and seven other men, including Groeschel, then founded the Franciscans of the Renewal to help poor people and to try to stay true to Catholic religious tradition. The flow of novices into the order shows they were on to something, he said.

"People here are looking for a sense of community," Sudano said. "They want to belong to something, but not simply to an organization: They want to belong to a family . . . that has identity, parameters, a mission, ideals."

Still, the decision for a young man to live by the order's dictates of celibacy and poverty does not come easy. In interviews, the novices in Newark described varied paths to the monastery: a spiritual awakening after an illness; a restless heart after an Army tour in Iraq; and, for a former truck driver, a feeling that God wanted him to become a friar rather than a husband.

Behind the wheel of his big rig, "I had a lot of time to pray and listen to Christian music and Christian radio," said Brother Teresiano, 32, who grew up in Modesto, Calif.

"Every time I started to go out with a girl, my relationship with God started to become cold," he said. "And little by little, through the Bible and watching movies of the saints, I realized God was calling me not to marry but to live for him alone."

Friars and novices at the monastery, formally called Most Blessed Sacrament Friary, awake at 5:30 a.m. each day. Morning prayer lasts from 6 to 9, and then novices take classes, do manual labor to help run the facility or volunteer at a nearby soup kitchen. After night prayer at 9:15, the novices and friars are silent until they're through the morning prayer.

That is not to say quiet prevails.

"We have all the sounds of Newark, the helicopters with the occasional spotlight coming down to the courtyard," Roemer said.

The not-so-serene surroundings of their monastery do not bother them, the friars and novices say.

"We choose to live in areas noted for poverty," Sudano said.