Jesuit priest lets God’s tenderness flow through him in ministering to gang members

After 40 years of ministering to gang members, Jesuit Father Gregory Boyle has a formula for breaking through painful pasts of abuse, violence, addictions and shame.

The “secret sauce,” he said, is making people feel safe, seen and cherished.

He invites every community to copy that healing model as a way to treat everyone, especially those outside the margins of society.

Father Boyle – founder of Homeboy Industries, the largest gang rehabilitation program in the world – spoke in Omaha on Sept. 19 at the National Christ Child Society’s 2024 convention.

His ministry, which serves about 10,000 people a year, has gained attention over the years, earning accolades for Father Boyle, including the National Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, which was bestowed upon him at the White House in May.

Though his ministry provides practical things like jobs, therapy and tattoo removal, it is not a “DMV of services” but a work of faith, Father Boyle said in an interview before his talk.

Therefore, he doesn’t measure Homeboy Industries in terms of victories or accomplishments, but simply by being faithful to God.

That model of ministry involves “the Christ in you” and “the Christ in someone else,” he told an audience of about 100 people, mostly members of Christ Child Society, whose mission is to help children and their families.

“So you choose to seek Jesus and to be Jesus, and you go to the margins to stand with the poor and powerless and the voiceless. You go to stand with those whose dignity has been denied and those whose burdens are more than they can bear,” going as far as standing with the “easily despised and the readily left out,” Father Boyle said.

“You get to stand with the demonized so that the demonizing stops, and with the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.”

‘LETHAL ABSENCE OF HOPE’

Homeboy Industries, based in Los Angeles, serves people who have been abused and lived on the streets, often from a young age. They turn to gangs, drugs and violence, and the outcome is typically prison or death.

Father Boyle told those gathered that he buried his first gang member in 1988 and buried his 261st three months ago.

The speaker and author of five books – some of which are required reading in several  Catholic high schools in the Archdiocese of Omaha – travels around the country speaking to groups about the “lethal absence of hope” he sees.

But that’s where his method – his faith – comes into play.

“Every man and woman who walks through our doors comes barricaded behind a wall of shame and disgrace,” Father Boyle said, “and the only thing that can scale that wall is tenderness.”

“A lot of homies will say, because they’ve been in prison, ‘We’re used to being watched, but we’re not used to being seen.’ So you create a place where they’re safe, and they’re seen and they’re cherished.”

“People are greeted when they walk in that door,” he said of Homeboy Industries. “Everybody’s whole being seems to say, ‘You’re here! You’re at home!’”

Homeboy Industries does not hold up a bar to be measured against, Father Boyle said. Instead, “we hold a mirror up and we say ‘You are exactly what God had in mind when God made you.’ Then you watch people become that truth.”

“You have to dismantle the messages of shame and disgrace that get in the way, that keep people from seeing their truth.”

HOMEBOY WITNESSES

Jacob Vargas and Dennis Chavez are two former gang members whose lives have changed because of Homeboy Industries. They accompanied Father Boyle to Omaha and spoke briefly during his appearance.

Chavez said he had lived on the streets of Los Angeles beginning at age 9, after enduring the abuse of his stepfather.

By age 11, he was an addict, he said. Father Boyle offered him help and a job at that time, and again at age 21. But it wasn’t until later, after six years into a prison term, that he “saw the light” and knew he had to change for the sake of his two children. Chavez entered a drug rehabilitation program in prison and sought help from Homeboy Industries.

Vargas said his parents abandoned him when he was 12 because he had been “running the streets, missing school, getting high on drugs.”

“I was an addict for over 20 years,” he said.

Vargas said he had been “trying to find acceptance in the wrong places.”

After years in juvenile hall, foster homes and group homes, he landed in prison at 19 for robbery. He continued breaking the law and ended up in and out of jail until last year when he decided to end his drug addiction.

“I was lost, lonely, nowhere to go, no one to turn to, no one to love, no one to hate for that matter,” Vargas said.

“I got clean and sober on this day one year ago,” he said. He had “prayed over and over asking God to break the chains of addiction, take away my pain, take away my hurt, take away the sorrow. … I knew I had to get right. I knew I had to make a choice and surrender it all to God. I took my chance and ran with it.”

After a couple of months of rehab, Vargas turned to Homeboy Industries.

He said he “finally found my purpose in life, finally found a place to feel at home with people that I can actually call my family, someone to turn to when I’m lost and need help.”

BECOMING THE TENDERNESS OF GOD

Father Boyle said that the tenderness needed to help gang members comes from a God Who looks at people “with breathless delight” and loves them tenderly.

“And so you receive the tenderness of God, and then you choose to be that tenderness in the world,” he said. “The only way that that tenderness gets there is through you. It’s the only way. You can’t read it in a book. You have to transport it.

“And so we say God is Love, and God loves me and God loves us. But then you discover that God is in the loving, and then you let Love live through you. And then you know that your true self is in loving.”

“We receive the tenderness of God, and then we choose to become that in the world.”

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