Bill's Focus

A priest does his job

I don’t have a “religion”. But I have a faith.

For me, a practical kind of guy, faith is about how we treat each other. Show me a religious group that cares about improving the welfare of ALL humans and ALL life on Earth and I might be interested. Simply put, I am in the camp of “we” not just “me”.

Below is an article that just melted my heart. And the guy in the story was a member of one of the world’s most corrupt and cruel religions ever created. Of course, that’s harsh. There was Mother Teresa and many other unselfish helpers of the downtrodden. But still, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the persecution and expelling of Jews from Spain and Portugal, the modern day sexual abuse of children and the continuing cover up of such crimes…all make my skin crawl. And the head of the “Christian” church in Russia supports Putin’s genocide in Ukraine!

Enough of my personal thoughts. Please read this story about a spectacular person who just happened to be a priest. Like I said. It’s about how we treat people.

By Margaret Renkl

Ms. Renkl is a contributing Opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. She wrote from Nashville.

You’ve probably never heard of Charles Strobel, but by the time he died on Aug. 6, at the age of 80, he was a hero here in Nashville, at least among people who worry about what the city is becoming: a place where only the well-off can live with any measure of comfort or security.

Even before Nashville’s swift and stunning growth began to gentrify working-class and impoverished neighborhoods, Father Strobel had already become our civic conscience. 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. “All you have to do,” he once told the novelist Ann Patchett, “is give a little bit of understanding to the possibility that life might not have been fair.”

That understanding seemed to have been inborn in Father Strobel, but his role as this city’s moral gadfly began in 1985, when he was a priest assigned to Holy Name Catholic Church in East Nashville. One cold night he looked out the rectory window and saw people sitting in cars in the church parking lot, trying to keep warm. He went outside and invited them in.

“I knew once they came through the doors that night, they would come back the next night and the night after that,” he often said. “I also knew I wanted them to come back.”

With the help of kindred souls, he managed to shelter and feed his unhoused neighbors all winter long. As he did, an idea bloomed. What if all the houses of worship here — all the churches and all the synagogues and all the mosques and all the temples — opened their doors to people without homes, too? Was it possible for Nashville, the self-described Buckle of the Bible Belt, to become a place where “Love your neighbor” meant something literal?

Father Strobel wrote a letter to the editors of both of the city’s daily newspapers proposing the idea. By December, four congregations were opening their doors to people experiencing homelessness, and a program called Room in the Inn was born.

Strobel was just getting started. Please read the full article – no paywall.