Br. Jeffrey Anselm

John Jefferson Gros was born on January 7, 1938 in Memphis, Tennessee, the son of Jeff and Faye (Dickinson) Gros. He left high school after his sophomore year to enter the Juniorate in Glencoe, Missouri. He made his Novitiate there in 1954 and attended St. Mary’s College in Winona, Minnesota completing his B.A. in 1959. His first teaching assignment took him to St. George High School in Evanston, Illinois in 1959 and then to Christian Brothers College High School in St. Louis, Missouri in 1962. He began graduate work at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1963 and by 1965 had completed his M.Ed. at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois in 1965 and his M.A. at Marquette in 1965. He taught at Lewis College in Romeoville, Illinois in 1966, at Christian Brothers College H.S. in St. Louis in 1967 and Christian Brothers College in Memphis in 1968. In 1969-70 he attended Fordham University in Bronx, New York and completed his Ph.D. there in 1971. For the next nine years he taught in the Theology Department of Christian Brothers College in Memphis. In 1981 he was Executive Director for Faith & Order at the National Council of Churches in the Bronx, New York. Jeff worked at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Manhattan, New York from 1982 until 1991 when he became Associate Director of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs for the National Council of Catholic Bishops and (1991-1993) for the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops (1993-2005). He continued his teaching at the Memphis Theological Seminary in Memphis from 2005 to 2009, at the Franciscan School of Theology in Berkeley, California 2009-2010, and at Lewis University in Romeoville, Illinois as Catholic Studies Scholar in Residence from 2011 until his death on August 12, 2013 at age seventy-five, having been a De La Salle Christian Brothers for fifty-eight years.