Fr. Boyle pursues “intelligent” approach to crime

Ms. Gregory Boyle has spent the past 40 years to change life and communities through the radical power of love.

Boyle's Journey is proof of a profound truth: Treatment of people as humans is necessary to rebuild the violence and the department, which, as people as people with the department, is necessary to serve global recognition with the US presidential medal and to maintain global recognition with the US presidential medal of freedom.

On May 15, Boyle will tell his story about faith operations as part of the lectures by St. Jerome University in Catholic Experience on the Waterloo Campus, Ontario.

After serving during the “decade of death” in the late 1980s and 90s as the pastor of the Dolores mission church in Boyle Heights in Los Angeles, he saw enormous loss and fear through the hands of violence and crime. Even decades later, his time to serve a community that was the poorest and had the highest concentration of gang activity in the city remains with him.

“I buried my first young person who was killed in 1988 for a gang violation, and I buried my 263rd young people who was killed a month ago for gang violence. Not everyone was from my community, but when I started, they all came from my community. Sometimes I had eight funerals in one time of three weeks, one by one after the other,” said Boyle.

The criminal justice and the social landscape of time have expanded an intensive reaction to increased violence. The tactics of oppression, including the brutality of the police and the detention of masses, was everyday, an answer that did not really fit with Boyle.

“In those early days, the only answer was to block them and throw them away.

The Jesuit priest has thus founded a new ministry that developed into Homeboy Industries, an organization that offers free comprehensive services and programs to support people with high risk, formerly affected people.

Homeboy Industries welcomes around 10,000 people through its doors every year and has grown from a basic solution to the largest program for gang intervention, rehabilitation and re -entry of the world.

As a single bakery, the non -profit organization started its 14th social enterprise and once gave hopeless gang members to thrive in areas such as catering, embroidery, sales sales, electronic recycling and finally dog ​​care. Homeboy Industries currently has 500 trainees in their 18-month training program, which is supported by a further 300 core staff.

While Boyle says that the most coveted position in Homeboy should be part of this 18-month program, people come from all areas of life for therapy, rage management groups, labor development, tattoo removal and re-entry services from young people.

“This lies the resistance that we can promote. Healing is a powerful thing, and everything that Jesus has done was to teach and heal. I think we can learn from it because (healing) much more than miraculous ways in someone who is blind, or someone who could not go is miraculous,” he said.

Nevertheless, in its primitive years, the Homeboy industry was not regarded by many as the compassionate approach, on which it is proud today. Rather, the locals complained as a radical and apparently worthless attempt to combat East-Los Angeles' ever greater barbarism on the streets.

“The first 10 years of our existence as an organization came with great hostility – bomb threats, murder threats and hate mail, because people bought the prevailing idea that no people were involved here,” said Boyle. “Everyone bought the law enforcement authorities, but 10 years later it became clear to the people of Los Angeles that Homeboy was not gentle, we were smart about crimes. Everything shifted after that moment.”

Although his work has been stigmatized in addition to gang members for almost four decades, Boyle still discovers various misunderstandings about the people who support his team every day.

“Gang violence is about a fatal absence of hope. Nobody has ever met a hopeful child who has joined a gang. In 40 years I have never met an evil or bad person, I have damaged, broken, injured, wounded and traumatized, but never angry,” he said.

“If we continue to believe that there are only bad people, it is the end of the discussion. We have decided to punish wounds instead of healing them, and that was a catastrophic misunderstanding. I am still confident that the day is coming when politics is out of date and prisoners are empty.”

Boyle 'method of taking care of the individual, regardless of their background or in previous mistakes, was an inspiration for many. His work as an author saw his 2010 book Tattoos on the heart: The power of limitless sympathy Become a bestseller of the New York Times, followed by Bellen to the choir: the power of radical relatives 2017 and The whole language: the power of extravagant tenderness in 2021.

The deacon Robert Kinghorn says that all the books and philosophies of Boyle were very influential in his own “Church on the Straße” Ministry in Toronto in his own approach.

“He is my hero and my model,” said Kinghorn, a Catholic register columnist. “One of the most important points he does in his books and conversations is that we cannot take an agenda onto the street to change people. It is based on reading this advice that I have developed my mantra for my Street Ministry:” Opening, don't judge, do not judge. “

“This was of essential importance for my Ministry of Street, in which I realized that when I am on the street every week, I have a firm service in God's hands, and my responsibility is to appear again and again, no matter what weather, no matter what reception I get.”

Kinghorn is not only in his praise from Boyle and Homeboy Industries. He received the California Peace Prize and was included in the California Hall of Fame in 2011. He also received the Laetare Medal of the University of Notre Dame 2017, the oldest honor of awarding American Catholics, and the presidential medal of freedom, the highest civilian honor of the United States, 2024.

Even as a leading figure in the world of social service, Boyle remains concerned with the simple man and expresses his hopes for those who participate in his latest lecture by St. Jerome, with another feeling of love for another on the street or his own neighbor.

“My hope is always that people look at a more spacious and expansive God than the one for whom we have decided. One who makes people see how God, like God, with the same sympathy, the profound understanding and understanding. Then we can make progress in our world if we believe that everyone is indistibly good and that we all belong together,” he said.