What Father Strobel understood is that compassion is the only thing that can save us.
"...Across the country, 35 other cities have created programs that follow the Room in the Inn model. All of it is a testament to Father Strobel’s vision of a right relationship between neighbors in a community.
“His radical idea,” wrote Ms. Patchett in 2013, “was that the homeless need not be served in low, dark places, and that people with nothing should be able to stand beside people with everything and hold up their heads.”
None of this was a capitulation to the political and economic realities of living in a deeply red state. Father Strobel never gave up holding politicians to account, pushing them to provide at the governmental level what individuals, no matter how good-hearted and full of neighborly love, cannot, or at least cannot on a scale that meets needs so fundamental and so widespread: housing, education, job opportunities, addiction and mental-health treatment, compassionate policing, judicial justice and the like..."
Margaret Renkl
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