Church Groups Tackle Problems With Dose of Love

And so there came the day when 54-year-old Guadalupe Ruelas would no longer hide behind her door like the rest of her neighbors at the Aliso Village housing project in East Los Angeles.

She went into the hall and approached three addicts.

“I was calm. I talked to them without fear and without insulting them,” she said in Spanish, recalling her words: “Please don’t do this here. Kids run upstairs and step on the needles. You should remember little kids live here. Be an example to them.”

Surprised, they begged her pardon, she recalled, and told her they would not do it again.

“You have to talk to them with love,” said Ruelas, who is divorced, uneducated, unemployed and sole supporter of a teen-age son.

When pressed about confronting the drug users, she said the source of her courage and peculiarly loving approach is a nettlesome question: “What would Jesus do?”

The same question has led her to befriend gang members who frightened her, to talk to the cholos and girls who steal clothes drying on the lines, hang out in the parking lot--keeping her awake--and sleep on the steps in the day.

“They are not as they are depicted,” she said. “I would not have talked to them before.”

“Before” means before Ruelas’ involvement with Amar a Dios (To Love God)--one of 12 Christian base communities at Dolores Mission, the poorest parish in the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese.

The mission is a scruffy little place where the poor give to the poor. For several years, the impetus for much of parish life has come from the base communities--a movement that started in Latin America to unite small groups of people at the base of society: the poor and marginalized.

There are about 120 base community members at Dolores Mission. Members hold spiritual meetings weekly, during which they pray, read the Gospels, look at the problems of contemporary life. They act through their Comite Pro Paz en el Barrio (Committee for Peace in the Neighborhood), their actions a result of the overriding question: “What would Jesus do?”

It is not a question for the timid or lazy.

They live in an urban war zone of drugs, crime and violence, a place where building heaven on Earth is an almost unimaginable concept.

But the overriding question has led them to shelter and feed the homeless on church property; to set up a day-care center for working mothers; to confiscate their own sons’ guns; to approach local businesses seeking jobs for youth; to monitor law enforcement officers for evidence of abuse; to reach out relentlessly to the neighborhood gang members.

To refuse to give up on anyone.

When base members talk about their work, they describe it as “building the kingdom.”

“He is going to make a single family,” Paula Hernandez said of Jesus. “He is saying, ‘Do good, don’t discriminate.’ (You can’t say,) ‘I’m not going to get involved with anybody but my children and neighbors; if others ask for help, no.’ ”

Without a firebrand, eloquent speaker or charismatic leader among them, the women could be easily dismissed as simply pious.

It would be a mistake.

Father Gregory Boyle is pastor at Dolores Mission--a post he will leave, at least temporarily, in June for a long retreat required by his Jesuit vows. He is famous for his work among gang members and for his stubborn insistence on a loving rather than adversarial relationship with them. For some, Boyle is Dolores Mission.

Clearly, he has set the tone at the parish, but Boyle sees the base communities at the center.

“These women are on the cutting edge. Anything that is going to happen here--if it does not have the participation of the base community, nothing’s going to happen. . . . They really are the church. . . . It’s theirs.”

Boyle recalls women asking one another at an early meeting why only women participated. “Without missing a beat, they said, ‘It’s because the men are afraid.’ ”

Not cowardice as a reverse of macho, he explained, but “fear of what it demands, the commitment. ‘Nos cuesta,’ they (the women) say--’It takes its toll.’ They’re out on the front lines. They put their lives in danger. It’s been a very feminist kind of movement. It’s empowering.”

Urban barrios may not be bastions of feminism and empowerment, but how else could one view the day-care center? Boyle asks.

The women needed jobs, had no place to leave their children and could not afford child care. Now, while a building nears completion in the church parking lot, the center operates in the parish school basement. The women staff it, and several have received professional training.

Boyle cites the women’s courage when they confiscated guns from their sons and gave them to him. But perhaps the primary example is their simple determination to reclaim the neighborhood.

No longer prisoners in their apartments, the women are a presence--sitting on the park benches, standing in the yards. They drove away the outsiders buying drugs from their fancy cars at the curbs. And they have taken on the gangs, whom they once reviled, with their primary method of disarmament--acknowledging gang members as people, inviting them to meals and parties.

The women decided the parish should take in the homeless. Each night, after Mass, at least 100 men--mostly immigrants from Central America and Mexico--pick up their bedrolls and file into the church to sleep on the floor and in the pews. The base communities, joined recently by other parish groups, take turns providing dinner nightly in the mission’s parking lot.

Reacting to what they considered a heavy-handed Hollenbeck Division police sweep against drugs at the Pico Gardens housing project, the women decided that the police needed to be observed in their dealings with residents. They have divided the area into nine units, appointed monitors, established a phone network.

“When the police come, we just go outside and watch for misconduct. We just keep an eye on them,” said Lupe Loera, who in the sweep a year ago saw one of her eight sons arrested. He was later freed without being charged. “At first the cops thought we didn’t want them to come. We told them no. We need them, but we want them to have a little respect for us.”

Things have gone well, she said, with few incidents. And she is convinced the women’s presence is a deterrent.

Capt. Norman Rouillier became commanding officer of the Hollenbeck Division in July. He said relations with the parish were strained last year, but that they now are working very well together.

Whether they express it in mundane or spiritual terms, the women of the base communities seem committed to building “the kingdom.”

They have not transformed the neighborhood, ended drug traffic and abuse, disarmed the gangs. Their successes are incremental and sometimes very transitory. The gang kids they have come to love relax with them one moment and declare a truce, then kill each other the next.

“Working for the kingdom doesn’t make it easier,” Hernandez said she concluded long ago. “What should we do? Kill all the drug people?

“That’s blasphemy. Jesus had dinner with them.”