Passion Play : Priest fights to give gang members a chance for redemption--as many chances as they need, in fact : FATHER GREG & THE HOMEBOYS: The Extraordinary Journey of Father Greg Boyle and His Work With the Latino Gangs of East L.A., <i> By Celeste Fremon (Hyperion: $22.95; 307 pp.)</i>

When Father Luis Olivares, the former pastor of Our Lady Queen of the Angels Church (better known as “La Placita”) was told in 1990 that he was being reassigned to a Fort Worth, Tex., church after nearly a decade of leading L.A.’s most controversial Catholic parish, he fretted over the legacy he would leave behind. Olivares had made many headlines in the 1980s. By declaring La Placita a sanctuary for refugees from Central America, undocumented day laborers, street vendors and the homeless, he’d gained the enmity of many politicians, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Los Angeles Police Department and even the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In establishing this unabashedly radical ministry, he’d also clearly rankled then-archbishop and now cardinal Roger Mahony, often outshining the region’s most powerful cleric in the media.

What concerned Olivares most was whether the “preferential option for the poor” (a term coined in the 1960s by radical Catholics known as Liberation Theologians) that he’d put into practice would remain La Placita’s political and spiritual calling. “If this prophetic ministry collapses,” he said in an interview shortly before his departure, “I’d have to say it was my fault, because I did not establish it enough on a grass-roots basis.”

La Placita today is the quaint, folkloric and touristy shrine that it was before Olivares’ arrival. Olivares died of AIDS in 1993, his spirit broken because the “prophetic ministry” he devoted his life to was wiped out by a new pastoral team allergic to controversial stands--to anything that smacked of a politicized church.

Olivares’ progressive approach to the ministry nevertheless lives on in Los Angeles in the work of two of his proteges: Jesuit Father Greg Boyle, the former pastor of Dolores Mission Church in Boyle Heights, and fellow Jesuit Father Michael Kennedy, Dolores’ current pastor. Together with Olivares they took up the cause of the “illegals,” and, in Boyle’s case, the gangbangers of East Los Angeles. For nearly a decade, Boyle has tried to stanch the bleeding of an increasingly violent Latino barrio that, in church demographic terms, is L.A.’s poorest parish. In this, he has succeeded and he has failed: Kids have been saved, kids have been lost. He has been nationally praised by some, and roundly criticized by others, particularly by many police officers and higher-ups, who, community-based policing notwithstanding, continue to believe that cracking down--and cracking heads--is the best policy. (See the County Board of Supervisors’ recently released report on the persistence of excessive force in the Sheriff’s Department.)

The philosophy Boyle espouses is a simple one: unconditional (and occasionally tough) love for the gang members. A simple creed, and, in these times of three-strikes-you’re-out politics, either naively out of touch or as prophetic in its radicalism as Luis Olivares’ ministry at La Placita. It looks as if Boyle’s prophetic voice--and that of the hundreds of community members he has worked with--is here to stay.

“Father Greg & the Homeboys,” by Los Angeles Times Magazine contributor Celeste Fremon, is an energetic, messy, disturbing and at times deeply moving portrait of Boyle and the dozens of “homies” he ceaselessly tries to bring back from what he calls the “darkness”--the seemingly irresistible rage that leads to so much carnage in so many neighborhoods across America today. Energetic, in Fremon’s single-minded determination to tell us, in minute detail, the joys and sorrows of the barrio (she spent nearly four years acting like Boyle’s “Siamese twin” to research the book). Messy, because Fremon’s passion oftentimes derails her narrative instincts--the collage of characters and events becomes at times a frustrating and alienating swirl. Disturbing, because although Fremon succeeds in immersing us in the heart of the barrio’s “darkness,” she doesn’t answer--or even sometimes ask--the tough questions that need to be asked in this excruciating context. And deeply moving because Fremon does ultimately deliver a humanizing portrait of a community that has been viciously demonized by politicians and the media. By so doing, she takes the first step that all of us must take if we are to come up with truly viable and permanent solutions for gang violence.

In some ways, “Father Greg & the Homeboys” falls into the tried--and many times failed--category of liberal-touring-the-ghetto narratives. At least Fremon deals with the perspective problem early on, as she describes attending her first burial of a barrio shooting victim: “Here I was, a middle-aged, non-Catholic, non-Spanish-speaking white woman in her nice new white Honda Accord marching uninvited into a crowd of angry, bereaved, highly tattooed adolescents who, likely as not, were heavily armed.”

Thankfully, her central character is anything but “liberal,” at least in the bleeding-heart sense. In progressive circles there is a clear distinction between those activists who join the cause to expiate their own guilt (or to assert a patronizing power over society’s “victims” because they themselves feel so powerless) and those who selflessly meld their private lives into the public they choose to throw their lot in with. Greg Boyle is clearly the latter. Unfortunately we get very little background: Boyle seems to come out of virtually nowhere to become the urban prophet that he arguably is.

What we do get is a detailed description, virtually diary-like, of Boyle’s life in East L.A., the kids he comes to love and, in some cases, helps to redeem. Here is Boyle riding a bicycle at 3 a.m. through the Aliso-Pico housing projects (where Boyle Heights’ numerous gangs are most highly concentrated) after he’s awakened by shots ringing out in the night; later he’s riding through the barrio on a peace mission when suddenly his car is fired upon--a bullet coming within inches of making yet another Catholic martyr. “What would Jesus do in this situation?” Boyle typically asks himself. Boyle’s Jesus, we understand, would ride around the projects on a bike at 3 a.m., wade into crowds of desperate youths and dodge bullets.

While much of the first part of the book is written in a spare, mainstream magazine style that does little to propel the narrative forward, Fremon livens up the text by allowing several gang members to profile themselves in first-person chapters. Thus we come to know Spanky, Cisco, Wizard, Ghost, Oso and others who by turns are disarmingly vulnerable, coldly vicious, charismatic and hilarious. They are kids--we must always remember that they are kids, teen-agers, sons and daughters in flesh and blood--really looking for an excuse not to gangbang, crying out for love in the most desperate way. Inevitably we hear about the abusive or absent father, the drug-deadened mom, the older brother already lost in the never-ending cycle of barrio pay-backs and, over and over again, about the lack of gainful employment that creates the idle time for self-destructive behavior to take root.

In some of her more lucid passages, Fremon portrays Boyle as a Jesuit constantly caught in moral conundrums that shake, but never quite break, his faith. At one point, Boyle tortures himself over whether to testify in court against a youth he knows was involved in a shooting. Should he invoke ministerial privilege, or testify and thus help to put him away? For many, the answer to this quandary would be simple. But Mosaic Law doesn’t take into account the moral complexities of living in a war zone. “Actions must have consequences,” writes Fremon. “Yet often it is difficult to see the virtue in demanding an eye for every eye in a barrio where so many eyes have already been lost.”

We follow the lives of Boyle and his homies through a series of triumphs and tragedies. The story of Ghost is typical. Here’s an intelligent kid who veers from being a model student with a future to a gang member on the edge.

In one moment he’s getting A’s on his report card and is set to begin a prestigious job. In the next, he is in Boyle’s office confessing that he stabbed a fellow student. But Ghost eventually comes back from the edge of darkness; today he has steady work as a production assistant in TV and film. For each story like Ghost’s, though, there are many others that lead to no such redemption.

Through the course of the book, Boyle buries several homeboys killed by rival gang members’ bullets. By intimately acquainting us with each of the kids, Fremon helps us see that any of the dead could have straightened up like Ghost. In this, Boyle’s and the homeboys’ Passion is the most Catholic of tales. Even as the darkness seems inevitable--there are many cases in which no level of intervention by Boyle or anyone else could prevent violence--there is the eternal flame of hope through redemption. And no one--this is, perhaps, the most unpopular of Catholic notions in today’s climate--but no one is beyond that chance for redemption. Boyle is there to give the kids that chance--over and over again if necessary.

A potential problem--depending on the reader’s perspective and knowledge of the barrio--arises form Fremon’s absolute focus on the spiral of violence. We don’t get the rest of life in the barrio here; no quinceaneras or first communions or weddings, no peaceful gatherings on porches, no grandmothers watching telenovelas , Mexican soap operas. That violence has gripped the heart of the barrio is undeniable. But equally true is that the heart still beats.

The final chapters of the book are the most compelling. We hurtle along toward Boyle’s departure date--he has been ordered by his Jesuit superiors to complete his final priestly vows and move on, as is customary, to another parish. The impending departure wreaks emotional havoc for all involved. Boyle is so attached that he can’t bear the thought of leaving; the homeboys and community activists cling to him like a surrogate father, fearing that the violence will escalate without his mediating presence.

When Boyle leaves, all hell does indeed break loose. At this point a curious thing happens to Fremon, both as writer and participant observer: She tumbles headlong into a Boyle-like mediation role in the barrio, virtually abandoning her “real life” in the suburbs. And what in the beginning had been bland magazine writing (early on she even has trouble spelling out four-letter words) becomes passionate--and very subjective--journalism. Like everything else in the book, this has its strengths and weaknesses. One issue that Fremon skirts--perhaps because she has plunged into a kind of messianic state, inspired as she is by Boyle’s example--is the issue of prophetic leadership and its double-edged sword. It is tough to ask the question, given the emotional connections between Greg Boyle and his flock, but it must be asked: Is the community’s dependence on one man in the end a healthy thing? Isn’t the goal of grass-roots organizing precisely the empowerment of a community so that the day the activists pull out, people are left in charge of their own destiny? Tough as it is to ask the question in this context, it is even tougher to arrive at an answer.

After nearly two years of trying to rescind his Jesuit superior’s order, Boyle is now back at his old post. One prays that if and when he leaves again (should he? shouldn’t he?), the legacy will be a lasting peace on this patch of earth bisected by freeways and hemmed in by the forces of discrimination and a not-so-perfect capitalist democracy. Greg Boyle would be the last to settle for peace for Dolores Mission’s parishioners only in the Hereafter.