What would Jesus do in L.A. gang territory?

A Jesuit priest who has been answering that question for more than two decades will speak in Hawaii next week

By Anna Weaver | Hawaii Catholic Herald

Father Gregory Boyle, or Father Greg as he’s most often called, is a nationally-known Jesuit priest and creator of Homeboy Industries, a nonprofit job and outreach program for former Los Angeles gang members.

What started small is now a huge operation that includes Homeboy Bakery, Homeboy Silkscreen, Homeboy Maintenance, Homeboy Merchandise, Homegirl Café, and Homeboy Press, all which provide jobs for former gang members who otherwise would have trouble finding employment.

A seasoned speaker (he estimates he gives more than 200 talks a year), Father Boyle will be in Hawaii to speak at the University of Hawaii’s Newman Center May 2-5.

The Hawaii Catholic Herald caught up with him on April 16 on his cell phone as he was driving to San Francisco to give a talk at a Jesuit Volunteer Corps dinner.

Fresh off a retreat with gang members and battling tiredness and bad cell reception, Father Greg talked with the Herald about how he was led into this ministry, why the Catholic Church should be involved, and how the economy is affecting Homeboy Industries.

What will you be sharing in your talks at the Newman Center?

I use a lot of my experiences, stories and parables working with gang members over two decades and try to use that to unlock the Gospel — in the same way that Jesus used a parable about farming. To this day, we may not know farming, but somehow we get the message that Jesus had in mind. I just finished writing a book so all of these stories are fresh in my mind.

Is this a ministry to which you’ve always felt called?

I didn’t see myself called to work with gang members, but I was called to work with the poor and that found me at Dolores Mission, which was the poorest parish in Los Angeles. Before I knew it, I was starting to bury young men and women in the community. This was nothing that I had ever seen before or understood. It was just a huge problem with having eight gangs and half of them at war with each other in a tiny parish area. Geographically the area was tiny, but it had the largest grouping of public housing west of the Mississippi. There were a lot of things to contend with, there was violence and death, and it became a sort of daily occurrence.

When you first started to do outreach with these gang members, how did you approach them?

It was all barrier. It didn’t matter that you were a priest. In the early days they thought I was an undercover cop. I ended up visiting folks while they were locked up. That gave me credibility, a door opened, and I walked through it. [They’d tell other gang members,] “Hey, this guy’s okay. He may not be an undercover cop after all.”

Why did you think the church could help in this particular area?

We started to get a new understanding of the church. The old way was “good people in, bad people out.” But that’s not the way Jesus thinks, so we kind of turned our notion of what the church ought to be inside out. Pretty soon the church was geography. These are the blocks that comprise our parish. Anything that happens in it is of concern to us. We don’t just put our nose in the Bible and go to Mass. What would Jesus do? What would Jesus say? What would Jesus think in term of terms of the gang issue?

We spent a lot of time in small, faith community meetings where people would gather in the projects and we would really try to reflect on what we ought to be doing. It led us to lots of outreach. First thing we did was start a school. Then we tried to get the factories that surrounded the housing project to hire our folks. But that just wasn’t really happening, so we started our own business [Jobs For the Future]. One thing led to another and it evolved in two decades into the largest gang intervention program in the country.

Were there any models that you were trying to follow in creating Homeboy Industries?

I don’t think so. We were trying to respond to whatever was right in front of us. All of these gang members were so young in the beginning days, in junior high and middle school. The public schools got to the point where they couldn’t case manage the gang members so they would just give them the boot. The kids would just languish out in the community, selling drugs and engaging in violence. I used to walk out into the projects and talk to them and ask them, “If I found you a school, would you go and stay?” They all said yes. [But] we couldn’t find a school [that would take them] so we started one in the former convent on Dolores Mission’s property. That brought them to the church and one thing led to another.

The school lasted for 20 years, and it sort of morphed itself into a brand-new city building where it’s a technical institute. It existed before there was such a thing as alternative schools, and now there are a billion of them. There is another location where we train gang members right out of prison to do solar panel installation in the hopes that there will be jobs somewhere down the pipeline for them.

Do you see more churches doing community outreach now compared to when you first started at Dolores Mission in the 80s?

Yah, I think people got into a more comprehensive view and they know that more stakeholders are needed, not fewer. We need to get clergy, teachers, counselors, employers and all the folks that make up any parish to acknowledge that everyone can be a beneficial presence to this population. And because everybody can, everybody oughta.

Is prison ministry still a big part of your work today?

I am in about 25 different detention facilities, and we have a prison outreach program where we have a Jesuit priest go in along with other staff of mine, who run retreats and that kind of thing.

Where does the future of Homeboy Industries lie?

Gosh, I don’t know. In these economic times, we are just trying to stay afloat and keep our doors open. That may not be much of a goal, but that’s our clear and present danger that we won’t have enough to make payroll. We just live from payroll to payroll. These are really difficult times and never have our services been in more demand than currently. We have people coming from all over the county, a thousand folks a month from 45 different zip codes, 8,000 gang members a year from 700 different gangs. It’s pretty intense in terms of trying to meet all of the unmet needs of the population. No one’s hiring, so they’re coming to me and hoping that I can incorporate them here. Plus all the funding is shrinking.

You’ve been doing this a long time, where do you get the energy to keep at it?

You’ve heard me yawn nine times already. I’m embarrassed; I wish I had energy. Giving this retreat has been intense and today was a particularly heavy and tearful day. Now I’m driving to San Francisco to give a talk at the JVC (Jesuit Volunteer Corps) dinner.

But I wouldn’t trade my life for anybody’s, especially being on these four days of retreat. It’s pretty heartening to watch these guys discover the truth of who they are, you know? It’s pretty amazing.