Fr. Greg Boyle, S.J.

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487 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 30 Jun

Fr. Greg Boyle, S.J.’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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The Spiritual Life with Fr. James Martin, S.J. · Greg Boyle, S.J. on compassion and kinship · 30 Jun 2026 podcast

For 42 years, I've walked with gang members, and I can say definitively I've never met an evil person, and I've never even met a bad person.

I've met wounded people, broken people, despondent people, traumatized people, mentally ill people, and addicted people, but I've never met anybody evil or bad.

I think if I can understand what a broken, wounded person is,

Yeah, it began when I was assigned to be pastor of Dolores Mission Church, which was at the time the poorest parish in Los Angeles, nestled in the middle of two public housing projects.

It had the highest concentration of gang activity in the whole city, eight gangs at war with each other.

So we started a school, then we started a jobs program, and then we tried to find felony-friendly employers, and we couldn't find enough of them.

So we started things.

We had a bunch of maintenance crew, landscaping crew, a crew to build our childcare center.

all made up of members of the eight gangs at war with each other.

And then we ended up, we couldn't find enough employers willing to hire our folks, so we started Homeboy Bakery.

And now we have 17 social enterprises, lots of restaurants, bakery,

electronic recycling, dog grooming, and 10,000 folks a year walk into our headquarters where I am delighted to be filming this with you.

And they're all trying to look for a way to reimagine their lives and move beyond gang violence.

Yeah, I did it while I was pastor.

So I was pastor from 86 to 92.

So in 88, we were born as an organization.

First, we called ourselves Jobs for a Future.

And then by the early 90s, we had changed our name to Homeboy Industries.

So we've just added things where this is quite a huge headquarters in Chinatown in Los Angeles.

It's our fourth headquarters.

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