PRIESTS
Tendering God on tough streets Carol Schuck Scheiber is content editor of VISION and editor of HORIZON, journal of the National Religious Vocation Conference.
COURTESY OF HOMEBOY INDUSTRIES
FATHER GREG Boyle, S.J. with his “homies.”
by Carol Schuck Scheiber
“God is always more,” says Father Greg Boyle, S.J., quoting Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Boyle takes the limits off love and has spent three decades extending it to gang members, inviting others to join him.
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ESUIT PRIEST GREG BOYLE knows how to work a crowd. He’s been hustling money for his work with poor people for much of his priestly life. As a priest, he’s been hustling souls for even longer. But “hustle” is too harsh a term for the God that Boyle is talking about tonight. As a winter drizzle falls on Toledo, Ohio, he stands at a podium in St. John’s Jesuit High School, and a small audience of do-gooders, church folk, and teenaged boys is in the palm of Boyle’s hand. He warmed them up by having two “homies”—former gang members in this case—tell heartbreaking stories of abuse, neglect, loss, and self-discovery through Homeboy Industries, the gang alterna-
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