Fr. Gregory Boyle has spent the past 40 years transforming lives and communities through the radical power of love.

From serving the gang-ravaged streets of Los Angeles to receiving global recognition with the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, Boyle’s journey is a testament to a profound truth: treating people as human beings is necessary in rebuilding what violence and division tear apart.

Boyle will share his story of faith-driven service work as part of the St. Jerome's University’s Lectures in Catholic Experience series on May 15 at the Waterloo, Ont., campus. 

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Having served as pastor of Dolores Mission Church in the Boyle Heights neighbourhood of Los Angeles during the "decade of death" in the late 1980s and ’90s, he has seen tremendous loss and anguish at the hands of gang violence and crime. Even decades later, his time serving a parish that was the poorest, and sported the highest concentration of gang activity, in the city continues to stick with him. 

“ I buried my first young person killed because of gang violence in 1988, and I buried my 263rd young person killed because of gang violence a month ago. Not all of them were from my parish, but when I began, they were all from my parish. Sometimes I had eight funerals in a three-week period, one after the other,” Boyle said. 

Adding insult to injury, the criminal justice and social landscape of the time made for an intense response to the elevated violence. Tactics of suppression, including police brutality and mass incarceration, were commonplace, an answer that didn’t sit right with Boyle. 

“In those early days, the only response was to lock ’em up and throw away the key. It seemed to me that anybody tough on crime was not serious about actually reducing it. I wanted to try and do things differently in response to that,” he said. 

With that, the Jesuit priest started a new ministry that evolved into Homeboy Industries, an organization providing free comprehensive services and programs to support high-risk, formerly gang-involved individuals. 

Welcoming roughly 10,000 individuals through its doors every year, Homeboy Industries has grown from a grassroots solution to the largest gang-intervention, rehabilitation and re-entry program in the world. 

Starting as a single bakery, the nonprofit just launched its 14th social enterprise, giving once hopeless gang members opportunities to thrive in areas such as catering, embroidery, clothing sales, electronic recycling and, most recently, dog grooming. Homeboy Industries currently has  500 trainees in its 18-month training program supported by an additional 300 core staff. 

While Boyle says the most  coveted position at Homeboy is to be a part of that 18-month program, people from all walks of life find themselves coming in for therapy, anger management groups, workforce development, tattoo removal and youth re-entry services as well. 

“Therein lies the resiliency we can nurture. Healing is a powerful thing, and all Jesus did was teach and heal. I think we can learn from that because (healing) is about a great deal more than miraculously giving sight to somebody who is blind or restoring someone who couldn't walk,” he said.

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Even so, in its primitive years Homeboy Industries was not viewed by many as the compassionate approach it prides itself on today. Rather, locals lamented it as a radical and seemingly worthless attempt at combating East Los Angeles' ever-increasing barbarity on the streets.  

“The first 10 years of our existence as an organization were met with great hostility — bomb threats, death threats and hate mail because people had bought the prevailing notion that no humans were involved here,” Boyle said. “Everybody bought the law enforcement take on it, but 10 years in, it became clear to the people of Los Angeles that Homeboy wasn't soft on crime, we were smart on crime. Everything shifted after that moment.”

Although his work walking alongside gang members for nearly four decades is stigmatized now, Boyle still uncovers various misconceptions about the people his team assists every day. 

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

“If we continue to think there are just bad people out there, then it's the end of the discussion. We have chosen to punish wounds rather than heal them, and that has been a disastrous misconception. I remain hopeful that the day will come when policing is obsolete and prisons are empty.” 

Boyle’s method of caring for the individual, no matter their background or past mistakes, has been an inspiration to many. His work as an author has seen his 2010 book Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion become a New York Times bestseller, followed by Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship in 2017 and The Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness in 2021. 

Deacon Robert Kinghorn says all of Boyle’s books and philosophies helping those with nowhere to turn have been highly influential in his own approach to his "Church on the Street" ministry in Toronto. 

“He is my hero and my model,” Kinghorn, a Catholic Register columnist, said. “One of the important points he makes in his books and talks is that we cannot go on the streets with an agenda to change people. It was based upon reading this advice that I came up with my mantra for my street ministry: ‘Show up, listen, don’t judge, don’t fix.’

“This has been essential for my street ministry, where I realized that if I follow this mantra every week I am on the street, I am placing the ministry firmly in God’s hands, and my responsibility is to keep showing up no matter the weather, no matter what reception I get.”  

Kinghorn is not alone in his praise of Boyle and Homeboy Industries. He has received the California Peace Prize and was inducted into the California Hall of Fame in 2011. He also received the University of Notre Dame’s 2017 Laetare Medal, the oldest honour awarded to American Catholics, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honour, in 2024. 

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Even as a leading figure in the social service world, Boyle remains concerned with the common man, expressing his hopes for those attending his St. Jerome’s latest lecture will walk away with a renewed sense of love for another, whether someone on the streets or their very own neighbour. 

 "My hope always is that people will consider a more spacious and expansive God than perhaps the one we've settled for. One that leads people to see each other as God does, with the same compassion, profound comprehension and understanding. Then we can make progress in our world when we believe that everybody is unshakably good and that we all belong to each other,” he said.