Paul KeenanFr Greg Boyle SJ works among the gangs of Los Angeles
On the streets he is known as ‘G Dog’. In researching the life and ministry of Fr Greg Boyle SJ, this is one of just two elements shared across the stories of the Jesuit and the thousands of members and former members of LA gangs he has met and helped in his 30-year ministry.
Aside from the name, affectionately bestowed by those for whom street monikers are a natural part of becoming a gang member, his birth in the same city as his charges is the only other commonality here.
Born into an Irish-American Catholic family, and educated to Master’s degree level via Jesuit schooling before his own entry into the Society of Jesus, Fr Greg’s world was, from the outset, a universe away from the ‘gang bangers’ so feared and resented by American society in equal measure.
“Not all choices are created equal,” Fr Greg reflects as he sits down with The Irish Catholic to discuss his work as a priest with more gang ‘parishioners’ than any priest in America (if not the world).
The opportunity to speak with Fr Greg in person has been presented by Ireland’s Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice, which extended an invitation to him to launch its latest book, Re-imagining Imprisonment in Europe.
Well qualified
He is a man well qualified to participate in such an event; in addition to his work with gang members, Fr Greg has links to 23 detention facilities in and around LA and regularly celebrates Mass for those whose sentences pre-date his environment-changing arrival in the parish at the heart of his continuing work.
That parish is Dolores mission and its church of Our Lady of Sorrows and the year was 1986.
Fr Greg offers some grim additional details.
“The parish was down the hill from the more affluent Boyle Heights,” he says, “hence the ‘mission’ title. It was a church offered to the poorer migrant communities who weren’t welcome beyond their neighbourhoods.”
Immediately suggestive of the early seeds of social exclusion, by the time of Fr Greg’s arrival, the bitter fruit was well established.
“The mission lies between two huge housing projects,” he explains, “and there were eight gangs at war with each other.”
The everyday reality of his surroundings became all too clear to a priest whose pastoral duties included officiating at funerals for those many, many victims of gang shootings.
By 1988, “I was burying kids from shootings morning, noon and night.”
The routine procession of funerals through the aptly named Our Lady of Sorrows convinced Fr Greg that something concrete was needed to stem the flow.
Approaching gang members with questions, the Jesuit quickly discovered that, regardless of gang affiliation, the youngsters related not just similar life stories of broken homes and progression into gangs and crime, but also shared very similar aspirations in life beyond the gang life.
“When I asked the kids ‘would you go to school if offered the chance?’ all, without exception, said ‘yes’.”
Faced with this universal response, Fr Greg felt himself challenged to examine the potential to make education for the youngsters an invaluable first step to a different life.
“The challenge in this was finding a school that would take the kids,” he says of the first stumbling block.
Met with a system that proved reluctant to take on this ‘troubling cohort’ – some schools had already expelled kids for disruptive behaviour and gang membership – Fr Greg decided to start a school of his own, quickly gaining a site at a local convent.
Attracting the right calibre of teacher proved somewhat more difficult. “One principal lasted two days,” he recalls.
What was always going to be trial and error eventually succeeded as a project which has built to a student enrolment of 115 for the current academic year, with teachers who are dedicated to the task in hand.
Graduates
“The teachers love the kids, and love them into submission,” Fr Greg says in tribute to those who have stayed the course to turn gang members into graduates.
Not one to rest on his laurels, or to view the parish school as an end in itself, Fr Greg realised early on that his graduates would need jobs to build on their academic success. In this, he says, he was at a starting point again.
“There are not too many felon-friendly employers out there,” he explains.
As before, self-reliance became the answer and, in 1992, as neighbourhoods in LA tore apart under riots sparked by the Rodney King case, Fr Greg finalised plans for the Homeboys Bakery, a community outlet which brought together former gang members who would work together on a range of breads and other baked products, sales of which would have a knock-on effect for other initiatives. Today the bakery supplies the linked Homegirl Café and has led to the Homeboy Diner, located in LA’s international airport.
“Eight social enterprises began with the bakery,” Fr Greg says, listing projects such as landscaping and graffiti removal among these. A Homeboys childcare facility was even completed using ‘local talent’, under supervision of tradesmen willing to share their skills.
This overall ‘Jobs for a Future’ project and its growing soon required a professional level of coordination, paving the way, for an umbrella organisation, Homeboy Industries, to grow on the corner block occupied by the bakery. The headquarters for all projects initiated by Fr Greg, Homeboy Industries now houses multiple outreach projects as well as overseeing social enterprises across LA County.
One of the most important projects currently backed by Homeboy today, and seen by former gang members themselves as key to their progress, also has its roots in the bakery.
Fr Greg recounts: “The tattoo removal project started with Frank, a guy working with the bakery who had a prominent ‘F—k the World’ tattoo. He believed nobody would give him a job with that and he came to me with a view to getting it removed.”
No easy request, tattoo removal is expensive and time-consuming, not to mention painful. The average treatment involves 12 individual laser sessions at six-week intervals.
Nevertheless, Fr Greg made it possible for Frank to erase the offending ink, and that individual effort led to a scheme under which Homeboy has some 3,000 people waiting for their turn under the laser. Today, 30 volunteer doctors use three laser machines, to perform approximately 745 tattoo removal treatments every month at Homeboy Industries. All for free. (Towards explaining the importance of the project, the Homeboy website reveals that “the majority of our younger clients have not necessarily dropped out of school; instead, many were ‘pushed out’ by the local district because of their tattoos”.)
Frank has since moved on from Homeboy and into gainful employment.
“We don’t tell them how to get ‘fixed’,” Fr Greg says of all Homeboy’s work, not just the tattoo initiative. “They tell us if we take the time to listen to them.”
Success
The proof of Fr Greg’s success lies in the fact that since 1992, the death rate for gang-related homicides in his area has crept down from the dangerous days when he first arrived in the neighbourhood.
Independent voices have directly credited Homeboy Industries in this. (Fr Greg was inducted into the California Hall of Fame in December 2011 for his work)
Again, not resting on his laurels, the Jesuit acknowledges the praise for Homeboy, but sees success as an ongoing project.
“There isn’t a gang member who doesn’t know about Homeboy,” he says, “and even if they’re not yet ready to come to us, we’re here when they are.”
And so the work continues, with ‘G Dog’ Fr Greg at the helm, waiting for every gang member to recognise, in a world of unequal choices, that there is one they can now make via Homeboy.
“Community trumps gang.”