A Father’s Love : Despite opposition from police and parishioners, Father Gregory Boyle is striving to end gang violence by bombarding young people with love.

In the still of a recent evening, the sobs of gang members resounded within the rough stucco walls of Dolores Mission Catholic Church. Bearing rosaries and wearing sweat shirts inscribed with the epitaph, “Rest in Peace, Trigger,” more than 500 mourners filed into the little Boyle Heights sanctuary for the funeral of 17-year-old Richard Paez, shot down at a pizza parlor by a member of a rival gang.

Members of Paez’s Clarence Street Locos and an allied gang, TMC, listened to a bearded Jesuit priest preach about God’s call for peace. Then they filed by the open casket, reaching in to give their friend a final caress or leave a possession--a gang insignia belt buckle, even a cigarette.

But the funeral Mass did more than mark the year’s first killing in the Aliso-Pico housing projects and served as a reminder of the soaring rate of gang-related violence in East Los Angeles. In the LAPD’s Hollenbeck division, which has jurisdiction over the area’s 400,000 residents, gang-related crime increased 67% from 1988 to 1989, compared to a 36% rise citywide. Gang-associated murders in the Hollenbeck area more than doubled--from 10 to 21--in the same period; citywide the increase was just under 18%.

But for the priest, 36-year-old Father Gregory Boyle, the shooting was more than another statistic. “There’s a climate of hate out there that’s quite alarming,” he says. “I’m hearing kids talking with great feeling about killing cops.”

Boyle hopes to allay the violence and guide gang members to a sound moral footing by “bombarding them with unconditional love.” He has established an alternative school for gang youths on church grounds and invited them to join his parish. Addressing them as friends, he pedals his bicycle through the neighborhood streets every day.

But his commitment to gang members has caused conflict with the LAPD and Capt. Bob Medina, a 28-year veteran of the force who took command of the Hollenbeck station in September. Boyle has repeatedly declined to provide police with information on gang members, while Medina, who believes gang violence can be deterred only through the use of force, accuses Boyle of refusing to fulfill his duty as a citizen.

Watching with mounting concern are community members, who are frightened by the increasingly unsafe world in which they live and uncertain if either the law or the church can end the violence that haunts their daily lives.

Boyle acknowledges that his work with gang members is hotly debated by both police and parishioners. Nonetheless, he says he will persist in the only strategy he believes will work, one proven successful by no less a figure than Jesus Christ.

A week after Trigger’s funeral, Boyle sits in his office, a small, eclectically decorated room the size of a monastic cell. Sun floods through the window bars in geometric patches, splashing a grid of light on the Latin American artifacts that hang on the wall.

Boyle wears baggy gray pants and a worn gray sweat shirt, donning his “priest’s suit” for the most part only to officiate at Mass. As he speaks, his native English is colored with the melodious highs and lows of a Bolivian accent.

After 13 years of religious training, capped by his ordination in 1984 at the Weston School of Theology in Boston, he spent a year working with the Indians in the mountains of Bolivia. It was there that he became grounded in “liberation theology,” which takes an activist view of the Catholic Church’s role in achieving social justice. “Having contact with the poor gave me life,” he says. “It evangelized me.”

As a boy growing up on the fringes of Hancock Park, Boyle was preoccupied by basketball and his position as managing editor of the Loyola High School newspaper. It was a world away from his work at this, his first parish, with its realities of gangs, violence, drugs and dysfunctional families.

Since his posting in the barrio, however, Boyle has dealt in activism as adroitly as most priests deal out Communion wafers. In December, 1986, he made news by declaring his church a sanctuary for undocumented workers. Three months later, he led a bus caravan of 250 parishioners to the Orange County home of regional Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner Harold Ezell. He gave interviews to journalists and wrote opinion pieces for newspapers.

Now, he declares, his commitment to help reform gang members has brought him “to the point of no return.”

In the beginning, he remembers, the gangs “wouldn’t give me the time of day.” When he began walking through the projects, gang members would stare him down and even swear at him, an “incredible” aggression, he notes, in a Catholic community.

But from the beginning, Boyle learned their names. “They said, ‘Oh, my God, he knows my name.’ They felt, ‘The priest likes me.’ ”

It wasn’t long before the gang members honored him with the handle, “G-Dog,” using the first letter of Gregory and a gang suffix. In turn, G-Dog obtained a bicycle and turned his walks into nightly pastoral rides, visiting each gang, listening to their problems and accounts of their activities.

In the fall of 1988, he began drawing gang members into the church community by establishing an alternative school for dropouts under the auspices of the Catholic Church.

The alternative school was located on the third floor of the church’s convent, upstairs from the Dolores Mission Catholic elementary school. Gang members mixed on the stairwell with small uniformed school children, and, before long, began hanging out at the church complex after class.

Both parents and parishioners began to protest their presence. By last August, there were widespread rumors of a petition to Archbishop Roger M. Mahony requesting Boyle’s removal from the parish, although no such petition was received at the archdiocese chancellery and Boyle says no one complained to him directly.

Adding to the unease in the community has been the growing discontent of the police, who believe the confidences Boyle has been gleaning from gang members constitute the sort of information on drug dealing and gang murders they are seeking.

It is over this crucial issue that the priest draws the line between Father and Citizen Boyle. “I don’t expect them to be priests, but often they expect me to be a cop,” he says. “They want information from me that I would never give.”

This stance of religious immunity exasperates Medina. “Father Boyle is in a position where he could be extremely helpful not only to the Hollenbeck area, but to the entire Los Angeles Police Department. I just don’t think we’re getting the type of cooperation we should be getting.”

So far, Medina and Boyle have had two meetings, which, both men say, were superficially cordial but deeply frustrating. The first meeting took place last September.

Says Boyle of the meeting: “They said, ‘You interfere with our arrests, you protect the kids, you give them sanctuary.’ I was taken aback. I knew it wasn’t going to be a friendly crowd, but it was downright hostile.”

For his part, Medina is certain that Boyle’s strategy of unconditional love will not work.

“He wants to pamper these people and take them by the hand. The way some of these people have been brought up, that would be working in their favor, that would make it easier for them to go out and break the law. These people understand only one thing and that’s force. We have to enforce the laws as strictly as possible against many, many of these people.”

In a recreation room in the parish, outfitted with second-hand sofas and a television set, gang members gather one afternoon and talk about their relations with the police. They wear neatly pressed T-shirts and jeans, and speak politely, if with growing anxiety.

“They come down claiming their own gang, LAPD gang,” says a 17-year-old who goes by the name of Speedy. “They take out a marker and they write on your shirt, ‘LAPD Gang.’ If you have any marks on your body, they do the same thing. They cross out your neighborhood and put ‘LAPD Gang.’ They just come and beat you down.”

A small 13-year-old called Dopey adds another story. A friend had stolen a bicycle and Dopey was riding on the handle bars, he says. They were stopped by police, and while his friend ran away, Dopey was taken to the Hollenbeck police station, to “the room.” (Here, a ripple of understanding snickers runs around the sofas.)

“They started beating me up,” Dopey says. “They were hitting me with a beanie club. They said, ‘Who is that other guy?’ I said, ‘I don’t know who he is.’

“They put that beanie club like choking me.” Dopey gestures under his chin. “I say, ‘Kick back, man. You’re choking me.’ I say, ‘I pay you anything you want, just let me go.’ He just keep on choking me. Then another cop comes and says, ‘Let him go.’ ”

For Boyle, hearing tales of police brutality is common. “Every day a kid comes to me and says, ‘We got hassled or beat down,’ ” the priest says.

Medina, however, views such accounts with skepticism. “It arouses my competitive instinct, to put it mildly, when I have people making allegations without any substance to them. There isn’t any evidence that any of these people have ever obtained medical treatment. “

But while Boyle is meeting opposition from the law, he must also deal with growing agitation within the community.

Although enrollment in the Dolores Mission elementary school has not been affected by the gang students upstairs, Principal Wanda Moreis says she and parents are concerned about their proximity.

“I have elementary-age children, and they’re fearful of the gang members,” Moreis says. Since gang members have been there, “parents are more diligent about bringing kids to school and picking them up on time,” and as an administrator “it’s been a concern of mine, trying to provide more supervision at break time.”

Moreis allows that the gang members’ behavior “seems pretty restricted” and that they have never harassed a child, but she maintains that they pose a threat to the children. “They are very unpredictable. You never know what they’re going to do.

“We try to build on student self-esteem and work with the positive. The gang presence represents a negative.” Parishioners also have expressed their discontent. Since gang members began hanging out around the church, attendance at Mass and related activities has dropped by about 10%, Boyle estimates.

Lucy Mendoza, a member of her Neighborhood Watch committee and an active church member, is one of those who has reduced her participation. “I don’t feel good about being around there much,” she says. “It’s dangerous. If you go to church you can be hurt. ‘It doesn’t look right. It looks like a juvenile home.”

The mixing of girls with boys is particularly worrisome, she believes. “They’re going to start having babies there at the church. They have no respect.”

Other parishioners, however, have gradually adopted a more positive attitude toward gang members. “I had a derogatory image of the gangs,” says church member Carmen Lima, who has lived in the Aliso-Pico projects for 17 years. “But through the work of Father Boyle, I’ve come to understand the vast majority of kids are in need of love and hope for their future.

Lima says she has noticed changes in the behavior of gang members. “Before, you would walk among them and they’d give you nasty looks, like, ‘How dare you walk where we’re standing?’ Now they move away nicely. Now you see them in church. Now you see them serve food (at church) for the homeless. This, never before!”

Boyle is optimistic about other signs of success. School truancy within the projects, which was rampant when he arrived, he says, has significantly decreased, due to parish-led community efforts and the channeling of students from the church’s education program back into the schools. Officials at the church-run school estimate a 20% reduction in the neighborhood’s school dropouts.

Boyle also points out that four years ago, five gangs were dealing heavily in drugs, whereas now drug sales are limited to only “isolated members” of gangs.

Sgt. Carlos Flores, who heads Hollenbeck’s Aliso-Pico Task Force, also sees drug-dealing as “way down.” Four years ago, he says, sales took place at the rate of 50 every 20 minutes. Today undercover agents “are lucky if they can buy (drugs) once a day,” an improvement he attributes to police action.

Boyle sympathizes with Dolores school parents and children who must face “these guys dressed like cholos, “ but he stresses, “we haven’t had a single problem.”

Archbishop Mahony expresses support for Boyle’s work. “You have to have an obedience to law,” he says, addressing the question of discord between Boyle and the police. “But that in itself is not going to change the hearts and lives of young people. You can’t just throw money and troops at problems and expect to find a change in peoples’ behavior. What Father Boyle is doing is supplying the need that those kids do not have. He has my support and admiration and collaboration in any way I can offer it.”

Official praise notwithstanding, in the wake of the year’s first killing, parishioners, gangs and the police are all edgy. The day of Trigger’s burial, Boyle says he experienced a major setback. After returning from the cemetery, several hundred gang members were gathered at the church. “It was a wonderful, cathartic moment,” says the priest, who, feeling the calm, briefly left the church on an errand. When he returned, “the place was surrounded by cops.”

Some of the mourners had broken the priest’s cardinal rule: They had jumped a member of a rival gang on church property. Furthermore, the victim was a girl who was being accompanied by her mother and grandmother to the church for the daily hand-out of bread. Girl gang members attacked her, then boys joined them. For two weeks, all gang members were forbidden from setting foot in the parish complex.

Since Trigger’s death, Boyle has met a second time with Medina. “I’ve appealed to the police with the moral argument,” he says. “I’ve appealed to them with the Constitutional argument in terms of harassment. None of that has worked. My appeal now is, please trust me, your strategy doesn’t work.”

Boyle is also lobbying his parishioners.

“Dolores Mission accepts gang members, we don’t reject them,” he told the congregation on a recent Sunday. “This church has flavor, tiene sabor . It has salt. Jesus said you are the salt of the earth and the light of the world.”

Still, Boyle is the first to understand the enormousness of the task he has undertaken and sometimes feels a sense of desperation. “I feel it every time there’s some violence,” he says. “I know I can only do as much as I can do.”

And what he can do is believe in his course of unconditional love. “The point is, what is the strategy Jesus would have us adopt?

“I want us to be prophetic on the issue of gangs. I want Dolores Mission to be the light.”