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catholicnewsherald.com | February 17, 2017 OUR PARISHES
Homeboy Industries founder asks, ‘Save the world, or savor it?’ Patricia L. Guilfoyle Editor
CHARLOTTE — Parishioners and friends filled St. Peter Church one recent Saturday morning to hear from someone who has wholeheartedly answered the Church’s call to go to the margins of society to stand with the weak, the despised and those considered disposable. Jesuit Father Greg Boyle has ministered in one of the most gang-infested areas in Los Angeles for three decades, founding Homeboy Industries to give thousands of young gang members job skills, a sense of self-worth and selfsufficiency, and a way out of the dehumanizing violence surrounding them. The author of “Tattoos on the Heart,” Father Boyle was the guest lecturer for the parish’s 2017 Kennedy Lecture Jan. 28. “We stand at the margins and we brace ourselves, because people will accuse us of wasting our time,” he began, but the prophet Jeremiah reminds us that “the voice of joy and the voice of gladness” will be heard again in the land of waste. “We stand at the margins because with God and Jesus, and the whole Church, we want to make those voices heard.” First, he told the audience, we have to understand who God is, and what our relationship to Him is, before we can answer the call to love and serve our neighbor – “erasing those margins” between us. “We’re endlessly creating God in our own image,” he said. “We’re human beings, we can’t help ourselves. This happens if we don’t graduate from our third-grade sense of who God is, and move into what St. Ignatius calls the ‘God who is always greater, the spacious expanse of God,’ the God who loves us without measure and without regret, the God who is too busy loving us to have any time left for anything else, the God that Jesus knew in His own mystical union with this tender, intimate close God.” But, he said, “We have this notion that somehow we have to measure up and we are eternally disappointing Him. Somehow we have to get beyond that. Otherwise, we’re going to be unable to stand at the margins in the way that God hopes we will.” As a loving parent, God “wants to be united to us, and who in fact doesn’t want anything from us. He only wants for us.” Fortified by this loving, parent-child, covenant relationship with God, Father Boyle said, we are able to reach out in truth to others – not as service-provider and service-providee, but as fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. “We don’t go to the margins to rescue anybody or save anybody, or to even make a difference,” he explained. “You go there because our whole life depends on it. This is how God has set this up.” When God tells us “so I have loved you,” He doesn’t ask us to love Him back – He asks us to love one another, especially with a preference toward the poor – widows, orphans and the stranger, he said. God singles out these particular people among the poor “because He thinks they’re trustworthy to lead the rest
of us to the kinship of God,” he said. “That’s my experience.” Father Boyle recalled how an interviewer once asked him how it felt to have saved thousands of lives, and he replied: “Honest to God, I’m not trying to be coy or cute, but I don’t know what you’re talking about. I know that I show up every day and my life is absolutely altered.” He continued, his voice cracking with emotion, “The homies rescue me every day from my cowardice and from my judgment. They rescue me and they return me to myself, and I’m deeply, profoundly grateful to them for the ways that they have saved me. That’s the truth.” The truth is, he said, the poor are always treated with shame and disgrace. Part of serving to the poor involves reaching out to “dismantle that shame and disgrace,” he said, and relieve their burden. Father Boyle peppered his talk with humorous, often poignant stories about the “homeboys” and “homegirls” he has shepherded out of gang life using the ultimate weapons the Church has in its arsenal: unconditional love and mercy. He said he likes to bring one of the Homeboy Industries homies with him when he gives talks, so they can share their stories, he said. At one particular talk with a group of social service providers, his homie Jose accompanied him. “Jose gets up – he’s about 25 at the time, gang member, tattooed, felon, in prison, parolee – but Patricia L. Guilfoyle | Catholic News Herald he had worked his way through our 18-month Jesuit Father Greg Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, addresses a full program and landed for a time as a very valued crowd at St. Peter Church Jan. 28 for the annual Kennedy Lecture. member of our substance abuse team, a man solid in his own recovery, and now he’s helping younger homies with their addiction issues. Been to blood. Kids at school would make fun of me: “Hey, fool, it’s prison and everything, but he also had a long stretch as 100 degrees. Why are you wearing three T-shirts?”’ a homeless man, and an even longer stretch as a heroin “Then he stopped speaking, so overwhelmed with addict. emotion, and he seemed to be staring at a piece of his story “He gets up in front of these 600 social workers and he that only he could see. When he could regain his speech, he says, ‘I guess you could say my mom and me didn’t get said through his tears, ‘I wore three T-shirts well into my along so good. I think I was 6 when my mom looked at me adult years because I was ashamed of my wounds. I didn’t and said, “Why don’t you just kill yourself ? You’re such a want anyone to see ’em. But now I welcome my wounds, I burden to me.”’ Well, 600 social workers audibly gasped. run my fingers over my scars. My wounds are my friends. And then he says, ‘It sounds way worser in Spanish.’ And After all, how can I help heal the wounded if I don’t we got whiplash going from gasp to laugh. welcome my own wounds?’ “He said, ‘I think I was 9 when my mom drove me down “Awe came upon everyone,” Father Boyle recounted. to the deepest part of Baja, California, and she walked “The measure of our compassion lies in not of our service me up to an orphanage. She knocked on the door, the guy of those on the margins, but only in our willingness to see came to the door and she said, “I found this kid.” And she ourselves in kinship with them. For we are all crying for left me there for 90 days, until my grandmother could get help, and if we don’t welcome our own wounds we will be out of her where she had dumped me. My grandmother tempted to despise the wounded.” came and rescued me. My mom beat me every single day of my elementary school years – things you could imagine and a lot of things you couldn’t. Every day my back was More online bloodied and scarred. In fact, I had to wear three T-shirts to school every day – the first T-shirt because the blood At www.catholicnewsherald.com: See video highlights from Father would seep through, the second T-shirt because you could Greg Boyle’s talk at St. Peter Church still see it, finally the third T-shirt you couldn’t see any
Former seminarian sued over sexual assault claim CHARLOTTE — A former seminarian has been accused of sexual abuse and assault while serving in youth ministry at Sacred Heart Church in Salisbury. John Brian Kaup has been named in a civil lawsuit filed by an unnamed female parishioner and her parents, who allege that he raped the 17-year-old the night of Dec. 25, 2013, on church grounds. Salisbury police investigated the matter in 2016 with no criminal charges filed. The civil lawsuit, filed Feb. 2 in Kaup Mecklenburg County Superior Court, also alleges that Kaup, about 27 at the time, continued to have sex with the teenager until mid2014, not long before she left for college.
After Kaup left the seminarian program in May 2014, Father John Putnam, who had been pastor at Sacred Heart Church, and not knowing of the allegations, hired him to work as the youth minister at St. Mark Church in Huntersville, where Father Putnam had been transferred as pastor. Kaup worked there until the summer of 2016. The Diocese of Charlotte and Bishop Peter Jugis are co-defendants in the civil lawsuit, which claims that they were negligent in their oversight of Kaup. According to the lawsuit, the unnamed plaintiff and her parents are seeking a total of at least $150,000 in actual and punitive damages from Kaup, the diocese and the bishop. Kaup is no longer employed by the diocese or in ministry in the diocese, according to diocesan spokesman David Hains. Beyond that, Hains said, “we cannot discuss ongoing litigation.” — Catholic News Herald
Catholic Men’s Conference set for March 4 HUNTERSVILLE — The seventh Annual Catholic Men’s Conference will take place Saturday, March 4, at St. Mark Church in Huntersville. The theme of this year’s event is “Men with a Mission,” and will feature talks by Robert Rogers from “Mighty is the Lord Ministry”; Father Bill Casey from the Fathers of Mercy; and former Carolina Panthers quarterback Steve Beuerlein. Bishop Peter J. Jugis will also celebrate Mass for participants. All men of the diocese are invited to attend the day-long conference, which will be held from 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Advance registration fee is $40, and includes a continental breakfast and lunch. Discounts apply for early registration, seniors, students and Knights of Columbus. St. Mark Church is located at 14749 Stumptown Road in Huntersville. For details and registration information, go to www. catholicmenofthecarolinas.org. — Rico De Silva, Hispanic Communications Reporter