Giving Thanks

Offering my deepest personal thankfulness for two special leaders and dear friends

At this time every year, I write about who I am most thankful for, and send little personal notes to people on that list for me. There is always family, and the happy news that Joy and I will become grandparents for the first time next year is clearly on my grateful heart. Another life changing moment.

This Thanksgiving Holiday 2024, I want to offer my deepest personal thankfulness for two special leaders and dear friends who have just passed or are passing away– but have lived out the gospel values most critically needed at this crucial moment in our history.

Father Joe Nangle

Father Joe Nangle, is a Fransican Friar who has now gone into hospice at the age of 92. Joe spent 15 years working and serving in Latin America, and became deeply involved with the Peruvian people and their culture. Joe tells the story of a woman he came to know who, like countless others, literally bore in their own lives and bodies the suffering and injustice of global poverty. The priest said to himself, “This must change,” and Joe Nangle has spent the rest of his life and ministry trying to do that.

The root of Joe’s ministry is his Franciscan obedience to Jesus Christ who told us that how you treat “the least of these” is how you treat him. Joe saw and learned that witness to Christ in Latin America. When he came back to the U.S., because he spoke Spanish so well, Joe Nangle went to work among Hispanic Catholics, whose lives in America had also become bound up with injustice, exclusion, and continual threats to their lives and families. Joe Nangle has offered an eloquent voice for justice and peace in the best of the biblical prophetic tradition.

But Joe was also always alongside those Christians and their families who become marginalized as a gentle, loving, and caring pastor. Along with his consistent prophetic words and witness, he could also be counted on for his big heart, easy laugh, and regular baseball talk!

Joe Nangle is for me a primal example of the prophetic pastor, with the courage to speak the truth and the compassion to care for the vulnerable–as faithfully as anyone I have known. Friar Joe did so day after day. And legions of us can tell you that Joe was a guy you always wanted to hang out with and to have some fun and find some joy.

Joe worked with me and Sojourners for some years, I recall being out on the road with him for a national tour called Let Justice Roll, with musician Ken Medema. We had just been to one city where the cheap hotel bathtubs were so dirty that we had to clean them ourselves before using them! But the very next night, a steering committee member in that tour city ran the local Four Seasons Hotel and wanted to help by providing free rooms for each of us. I watched Joe as he opened the door to his own luxurious private suite; and immediately dropped to his knees and crossed himself!

I had the wonderful opportunity to speak to Joe in hospice just days ago, and he was as lucid, visionary, and joyful as he always is–even though his body was failing. When I told Joe I believed he embodied the gospel of Matthew 25 for me, and his example is absolutely crucial for where we are now in this critical moment of defending the vulnerable. Always enthusiastic in his responses, Joe quickly agreed and said, “We just need to go forward now!”

Thanks Joe, and with your most Christ-like example, we will.

Dr. Janelle Goetcheus

Dr. Janelle Goetcheus died on October 26, 2024 and we celebrated her life on November 16 in a very full Notre Dame Chapel at Trinity Washington University. Janelle always quietly filled the room wherever she was with a presence we always needed and her memorial service gathered a large and diverse group of thankful people again.

On a visit to Washington D.C., many years ago, at the invitation of Gordon Cosby of the Church of the Savior, this Indiana University medical school graduate and her husband Allen, were taken to see a low-income housing building which was a ministry of the church. This young couple was still waiting for their visas to serve the poor internationally but when the people in that housing ministry learned she was a doctor, they pleaded with Janelle about all of their tremendous and unmet medical health care needs. That visit changed their lives. Janelle and Allen felt called to come to Washington D.C., with their kids, to serve poor people in the nation’s Capitol which changed so many other people’s lives.

In 1979, Janelle founded the Columbia Road Health Clinic, just for low-income people, including immigrant families. More neighborhood clinics came after that. Homelessness in Washington was epidemic in those days and getting those marginal people to the urgent health care they often needed was very problematic. Communities like Sojourners set up overnight shelters to at least get people and families with children off the streets, especially on cold nights.

Janelle was always ready to take health care to the people who needed it, wherever they were–and find a way to do it. She went to serve people living in homeless shelters and even on the streets. She created mobile healthcare vans to the grates where homeless people often gathered and stayed–to serve them right where they were. But there was nowhere for the homeless to go and stay when they were sick, so Janelle envisioned that too.

On Christmas Eve 1985, Christ House was opened for the homeless and sick, and over the last four decades, has provided care for 10,000 patients as guests. In 1985, when Washington D.C. was given a grant to begin the Health Care for the Homeless Project, Dr. Goetcheus became its first Medical Director. It oversaw several community health care centers and clinics for the homeless, and continues today as Unity Health Care. In her busy life, she also liked to watch the sports games, just like Joe Nangle, and me!

Dr. Janelle Goetcheus literally transformed health care for the homeless in Washington D.C. and countless reflections at her memorial service testified to that–and how her models have been followed all over the country. Dr. Goetcheus also testified before Congressional committees about how to bring needed health care to the poor and homeless more directly and efficiently, and that health care needs in America were structural and needed transformation. But for all the “Physician of the Year” and like awards Jenelle won, she was always so genuinely humble, soft-spoken, and a good listener to people who were sick–while her voice to the powers that be was so prophetic.

Janelle Goetcheus didn’t just provide quality health care, but offered a relationship with a doctor that was quickly trusted, and one deeply rooted for her in the love of Christ. Just looking into her loving eyes, hearing her caring voice, and believing her reassurances of more needed help to come, was the beginning of healing for Jenelle’s patients. Janelle Goetcheus literally embodied the presence of Christ in the 25th Chapter of Matthew for American health care, even living in Christ House with her family and children. Early on at Sojourners with no common health insurance for our community she demanded to be my personal physician! “Just call me when you need me” was Janelle Goetcheus' message to all around her. We became long time friends and collaborators.

For the love and care in your eyes and the smile on your face you always had for us all, and for countless people who were sick and scared, we are so grateful Janelle for you.

Both these great but humble leaders and dear friends to so many of us, now represent what is most needed now: an unwavering commitment to defend the vulnerable, and to be prophetic pastors after the manner of Matthew 25, to make the least of these our first priority when the powers that be make them the last.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you! Let’s all be thankful, grateful, faithful, and getting ready to go forward with Matthew 25.