NASHVILLE, TN — In the late 1950s, Charles Strobel sat in the classrooms of Father Ryan High School on Elliston Place and absorbed the message of Christian love. He followed the example of his teacher, then-Father Jim Zralek, and served those on the margins of the community, at places like the Sugar Shack and in the shacks of North Nashville. It was on the Father Ryan campus that he launched a life of service.
Now, generations of Father Ryan students will have his example to guide them as they begin their own paths of service.
On April 22, Father Ryan inducted 22 students into the newly-named Father Charles Strobel ’61 Service Society – formerly the St. Vincent de Paul Service Society – honoring the school alumnus, champion of the poor and founder of Room In The Inn – a national model of shelter, care, and support for those without homes to call their own. Father Strobel died last August. The original St. Vincent de Paul Society was created in 2010 to salute those students who demonstrate a deep commitment to serving others.
In making the announcement, Father Ryan President Paul Davis ’81 said the decision to rename this important society began long before Father Strobel’s passing. “Father Strobel was a living part of our community,” he said, “a person whom our students have known and loved for years, just as he knew and loved them. So many students have served at Room In The Inn, have welcomed their guests to the campus on Christmas Eve, and have learned important lessons about serving others in the same ways that Father Strobel learned while he was a student here. We are humbled to honor his spirit with the naming of the Society.”
The Father Charles Strobel ’61 Service Society awards students who have served at least 120 hours in their community through the Corporal Works of Mercy. At least 40 of those hours must be with one organization to show a commitment and understanding of that organization over time. To be accepted into the society, students serve, apply by writing about their service, its meaning, and its challenges, and receive recommendation from that organization. Twenty-one students will be inducted this year.
at Father Ryan High School.
congratulates the students and tells them about her brother’s life.
Martin Strobel, nephew of Father Strobel and a 1985 Father Ryan graduate, said the salute to his uncle is especially meaningful. “Uncle Charles was a positive presence in the lives of everyone he met,” Strobel said. “Our family remembers his laughing, singing, and the kindness and joy with which he lived his life. He was an inspiration for us and all in our community, demonstrating how a life of service could change lives, including our own. For Father Ryan to honor Uncle Charles in this way continues that inspiration for generations of students to come. We are pleased – and know that he would be humbled and thrilled – that his name will always be connected to his life and his school.”
Born in Nashville in 1943, Strobel lived a life of radical service defined by his conviction that society’s highest obligation is to care for its most marginalized members, from those on the street to those on death row. He delivered his call for peace and justice with gentle warmth and an easy smile, drawing to him people of every faith, creed, ethnicity, and perspective in common cause.
The place where so many gathered to make Charles Strobel’s vision of the beloved community a reality was Room In The Inn, a singular continuum of care for the unhoused that is rooted in hospitality. Strobel first conceived of Room In The Inn on a winter evening in 1985, when he looked out the window of the rectory of East Nashville’s Holy Name Catholic Church, where he was the pastor, and saw cars parked in the church lot. Inside those cars were people trying to make it through the bitter cold night.
He invited them in. He then made a pile of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, found enough blankets and pillows for everyone, and gave them use of bathrooms and hot showers. “I knew once they came through the doors that night, they would come back the next night and the night after that,” he later said. “I also knew I wanted them to come back.”
This initial act of kindness became the germ of Father Strobel’s larger idea: a city-wide program in which congregations across Nashville would welcome the homeless into their houses of worship and provide them food, shelter, and – most important of all – community. Father Strobel launched Room In The Inn early in December 1986 with four congregations. Today, Room In The Inn comprises nearly 200 congregations from a wide variety of traditions and more than 7,000 volunteers who shelter nearly 1,500 people from November 1 through March 31 each season.
Father Strobel grew up on 7th Avenue North between Madison and Monroe Streets, a quiet, integrated block of Germantown that was anchored by the Church of the Assumption, where he received the Catholic sacraments and said his first Mass after being ordained in January 1970. He graduated in 1961 from Father Ryan High School, where he earned the nickname, “Sunshine.” After four years in the seminary at St. Mary’s College in Kentucky, where he received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, he received a master’s degree in theology from Catholic University in Washington, DC in 1969. During his years in Washington, he became immersed in the Civil Rights Movement. He also received a master’s in education from Xavier University and an honorary doctorate in divinity from MacMurray College.
After his ordination, Strobel served for five years in Knoxville as the Associate Pastor of Immaculate Conception parish. He also taught at Knoxville Catholic High School and was an instructor in the University of Tennessee’s Department of Human Services. While in Knoxville, he opened the city’s office of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the first of many ecumenical initiatives that marked his career. In 1975, he returned to Nashville to serve as pastor of Holy Rosary Catholic Church in Donelson. In 1978, he was named the pastor of Holy Name, where he served until 1987 when he left to devote himself full time to Room In The Inn.
