For nearly two decades, he's embraced the boys others have shunned. He has prodded thousands of gang members to trade lives of violent crime for honest work, visited them in hospitals and prisons, comforted their families.
In the process, Father Gregory Boyle has become an iconic and healing presence in his Boyle Heights community.
But now the priest is ill with leukemia, and the people he has so deeply touched see that it is their turn to take care of him.
Since Boyle's diagnosis in March, he has been deluged with visits, calls and letters from people ranging from the Los Angeles police chief to homies in prison. Homeboys he hasn't seen in a decade have turned up, tears streaming down their faces, offering their organs and blood.
"I got a gang of blood, a gang of blood," Boyle says one homie told him.
People have plied him with health juices, vitamins and offers of Mexican healers and folk remedies. Actor Martin Sheen is urging him to take an all-expenses-paid trip to Lourdes, France, where healing miracles are said to occur.
Women at Dolores Mission Church, where Boyle first served as pastor in 1986, have organized a weekly prayer service Thursday nights.
Lupe Lorea, 63, who started the gatherings two months ago, says she became close to Boyle 15 years ago when he visited her wounded son at the hospital and stayed to listen to her troubled story of two abusive marriages. Since then, she said, Boyle has helped to guide her in raising eight boys as a single mother.
"He's the one who came to rescue me," Lorea said.
The first fund-raiser for Boyle's Homeboy Industries -- a $300-a-plate affair at the Cathedral Center tonight featuring top Roman Catholic clerics, public officials and such celebrities as Kirk Douglas and Anjelica Huston -- quickly sold out.
"Everyone is thinking ... that this may be my eulogy," joked the bearded and balding Boyle, 49. But the priest says his cancer is "inching toward remission" and believes he will outlast the six years that patients with his particular disease, chronic lymphocytic leukemia, are typically given to live.
Boyle says the outpouring of love and care has overwhelmed him. "I feel surrounded by God," he said. "I'm the luckiest person on the planet."
