Fr. Greg Boyle, who founded Homeboy Industries over 40 years ago, teared up a little last night at Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. He was telling us a story about Danny, a former gang member who found himself standing next to an older gang member on a Metro train.
Danny was wearing his Homeboy shirt. The man asked if it worked. “It has for me,” he said. As the train pulled into a stop, Danny took a piece of paper and wrote the address down and handed it over. “Thanks,” the man said as he got off. As the train pulled away, Danny said that all the other passengers were looking at him and smiling. Danny told Fr. Greg about it later. This is the part that got to Fr. Greg. He put his hands to his face as he said it, as if trying to hold himself together. “It was the first time in my life I felt admired,” Danny told him.
Fr. Greg was preacher at the annual Red Mass, which according to medieval tradition the archdiocese hosts each October for Roman Catholic attorneys, judges, and other legal workers. I was along as a member of the traditional ecumenical and interfaith cheering session, organized by Fr. Alexei Smith, the archdiocese’s veteran ecumenical and interfaith missioner.
I can only imagine how Fr. Greg’s witness fell on the ears of those in charge of the institutions in which so many Dannys get chewed up and lost. We have so much work to do to make our society fairer, to secure equal opportunity for all. But in the meantime, Fr. Greg and his colleagues are laboring in the world as they find it, saving one life at a time.
The lessons continued to fall from his lips, almost all of them about the shame and hopelessness that fall over kids’ shoulders. “Once you meet the God of love,” he said, “you fire all the other gods.” Riffing on the gospel reading, he said, “Stay awake, because while death is of course coming, life is happening, and you want to be there for it.” He’s straightforward about the impact he has, not to clothe himself with righteousness but to sing to his listeners about the power we have to make a difference, all the time. He said one Homeboy client told him, “Because Fr. Greg believed in me, I decided to believe in myself. The best way I could show my appreciation was to change my life.”
The keynote speaker was Carolyn B. Kohl, a pioneering Superior Court judge and UCLA lecturer, who talked about the hard knocks legal professionals sometimes take and said that, for the faithful attorney and judge, the gift of civility is a form of charity. In that very spirit, receiving special recognition during the program was Marge Graf, a corporate attorney and diocesan lay leader who negotiated the archdiocese’s recent settlement with over 1,300 victims of clergy sexual abuse, of whom she spoke with deep compassion and contrition. Plaintiffs’ attorneys have spoken publicly of her professionalism and empathy.
It was also noted that Marge had made 20 centerpieces for the reception after the mass, where I met Sister Anncarla Costello, chancellor of the archdiocese. I said something about our denominations having in common our reliance on gifted lay volunteers for everything from flower arrangements to, in Marge’s case, $850 million legal settlements. “That’s $880 million,” the chancellor said with a smile that also managed to communicate compassion for those who had been victimized and scarred. Fr. Greg is helping in his way, and Sister Ann and Marge in theirs. It’s all we can do.
