“no life is less valuable than another.”
------Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
In Father Greg’s life, Boyle spent a year living and working with Christian base communities in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Upon his return in 1986, he has ministrations in Dolores Mission Church, a Jesuit parish in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles that was then the poorest Catholic church in the city. At the time, the church sat between two large public housing projects and amid the territories of numerous gangs. Therefore, Boyle witnessed countless gang crimes and cries. Gang violence not only destroyed a family but ruined the whole community.
Embracing gentle and hard-earned wisdom, Father Greg and members in the church founded Homeboy Industries which trained and educated former gang members in communities with diverse educational and social programs. This action actually wasn't accepted by most people in 1988. The slogan in front of Homeboy Industries, “Treating gang members as human beings,” seems implausible and clownish. But Boyle made it: under the efforts of helping and motivating incarcerated people, he and his team helped 5,590 communities, held 21,500 class sessions, and helped 11,840 people remove tattoos. These tattoos were the symbol of crimes and violence hidden in our communities, but they are decreasing dramatically right now.
In 2010, Boyle published his first book Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion. Later, he published his second book Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship. These two books present two significant purposes and wishes of Homeboy Industries: love and kinship, which are Boyle’s important life credos as well. In the book Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, Boyle writes, “The strategy of Jesus is not centered in taking the right stand on issues, but rather in standing in the right place—with the outcast and those relegated to the margins.” He always cares about marginalized people even though most of us never think about paying attention to them. Because of crimes he witnessed and suffered, Boyle has an impressive understanding of unconditional love, which means how full our lives could be if we could find joy in loving others and in being loved unconditionally.
In 2014, President Obama named Father Boyle a Champion of Change. He received the University of Notre Dame’s 2017 Laetare Medal, the oldest honor given to American Catholics. In 2021, he served as a committee member of California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Economic and Job Recovery Task Force as a response to COVID-19.
In Father Greg’s life, Boyle has spent 33 years helping incarcerated people go back to society and embrace new lives. He is still walking on this “road” which uses his own actions to tell us the power of unconditional love and the importance of fighting despair, gorgeous and uplifting……
