A Nashville Legend Leaves a Legacy of Compassion

‘P roof That One Life Can Change the World” — the title itself drew me in and did not disappoint.

This New York Times column was about Father Charles Strobel, a Nashville legend. Not the Opry kind, but the human kind. The columnist, Margaret Renkl, clearly wanting him to go national, describes him as “our civic conscience.” She writes, “What he understood is the difference between charity and community — a difference founded in kinship, in recognizing that we all fall down, that sometimes it takes another hand to pull us up again.” Elsewhere, the columnist Pat Nolan adds: “There are few among us that live their lives as a saint or an angel walking among us. But Charles Strobel did.”

One of the things Father Strobel is known for is establishing an ecumenical outreach to the homeless, Room in the Inn. On a winter night in 1985, he looked out his rectory window and saw people sleeping in cars to keep warm. He welcomed them in with offerings of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. According to his obituary, he remembered: “I knew once they came through the doors that night, they would come back the next night and the night after that. . . . I also knew I wanted them to come back.”

That second part makes all the difference. It’s one thing to do random acts of charity. It’s another thing to want to become a part of people’s lives.

“Forty years ago, Father Strobel became pastor of an old, under-resourced but solidly Catholic inner-city parish,” his longtime friend Father Owen Campion writes in Our Sunday Visitor.

Many times every day, people out of luck came to the door asking for help. Rather than giving them a sandwich and closing the door, Father Strobel planned, organized, recruited help and raised money for what became the most effective, imaginative and inclusive sanctuary for the homeless in the city.

The city of Nashville, bursting at the seams — which could mean leaving behind those who are homeless or mentally ill or otherwise struggling — is about to open a secular center based on his model, in his name.

Father Strobel’s ministry to people on the streets of Nashville is inspiring, but what he’s also known for is somewhat shocking. His widowed mother, Mary Catherine, went to Mass at his parish on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on December 8, 1986. Afterward, she disappeared while doing volunteer work. She was found later in the trunk of her car; she’d been stabbed after being robbed of $34. The man who killed her had escaped from a mental facility.

Father Strobel and his family refused to seek the death penalty for her murderer. At his mother’s funeral Mass, he said, “We are not angry or vengeful, just deeply hurt. We believe in the miracle of forgiveness and extend our arms in that embrace.”

Forgiveness means peace. The person who killed my mother has forced evil on my heart, but stamping out the killer doesn’t stamp out the evil. It’s done. I understand how painful it can be, and I understand the pain of others that this person deserves to die for killing someone I love so much, and to even the score. But you can never even the score by killing one, or killing a thousand.

Father Strobel clearly learned from his mother. As he recalled in an interview:

You couldn’t contain my mother. . . . She was involved with everything. She’d go to church in the morning, visit someone in the hospital, go to the soup kitchen, drop some clothes or a sack of groceries off to a family after work. She knew life was precious; she couldn’t bear the thought of anyone being alone without someone to care for them.

In a video about Room in the Inn, Father Strobel said,

I’ve described the program as a sanctuary from the violence of the streets, or as Ellis Island for urban refugees, or a Red Cross tent in a war zone, or as an oasis in an asphalt desert, or a gathering of friends, or as a rewriting of the original no-room-in-the-inn story. The most important image I use now is the notion of a communion meal.

It’s about encounter and intimacy. It’s about seeing a person as a person and not a cause. And he did it because of God. Because he saw so much more than the sorrows and challenges of life on this earth.

In Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America, Chris Arnade recounts how he came to encounter suffering people — with the same reverence that Father Strobel had. His book reads like a hymnal, celebrating the gift of each human life. And the beauty of it is how someone who is not living a life of worldly success sees that as a treasure.

Legacy of Mercy, by Gretchen R. Crowe, tells the story of Rachel Muha’s amazing grace in forgiving her son’s murderer. Muha emphasized something critical:

Rejection of the death penalty does not mean rejection of justice or punishment. If we excuse them, we offer them no real hope for a life of happiness. We have to have real love — a love that requires accountability and demands conversion. . . . Real compassion begins with forgiveness, but also says: I know what you did. You were wrong — you were bad. But together we can become holy.

There it is again! Relationship! Even with the man who killed your son!

Hope and conversion come by seeing the witness of people like Father Strobel, Chris Arnade, and Rachel Muha.

And know that Father Strobel is not an exotic space alien. As his successor as the head of Room in the Inn said in an interview, “every one of us has the ability to love our neighbor.”

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.