COLUMN ONE : Praying for a Father’s Return : Gregory Boyle eased gang tensions in Pico-Aliso. But the peace shattered with the priest’s transfer. ‘We need him to put us back together,’ says one activist.

Almost as soon as Father Gregory J. Boyle left Dolores Mission last summer for a yearlong spiritual retreat, the gang members he had sought to love into submission stepped up their self-destructive war.

Cuatro Flats, whose members once worked and bantered with Boyle, now cannot go to the church without venturing onto enemy turf. The Mob Crew, once their allies, now face gunfire if they journey to the last-chance high school Boyle founded for troubled youths.

Despite sagging business, the corner liquor store has begun closing early to avoid nighttime mayhem. Violence, always part of life in the surrounding Pico-Aliso housing project, has become less sporadic and more deliberate, with cheap handguns stashed in waistbands giving way to high-powered assault rifles mounted on rooftops.

“Father Greg set the moral tone for a lot of youngsters raised without love and rules,” said probation officer Mary Ridgeway, a veteran watchdog of Eastside gangs. “Since he’s left, a lot of people have been holding onto the bare threads, waiting for him to come back.”

But Boyle, who has spent the last two months as chaplain at Folsom State Prison, will not be coming back.

His superiors at the California Province of the Society of Jesus, which teaches that no man is indispensable, decided this month to reassign him elsewhere in the state, although the location has not been announced.

To a community aching from Boyle’s absence, the loss has stirred feelings of betrayal and fear, with some residents making apocalyptic predictions about life without their peacemaker and padre, the one they call G-Dog. “If G. don’t come back,” said a gang member named Titi, “people are gonna die.”

It is testimony to the power of one man who combined a generous heart with street moxie and stern paternalism, whose tough love was able to touch people in the profound way that most government programs--even with their million-dollar budgets--cannot.

But it also raises a troubling question about Boyle’s work: What did he achieve if he did not empower his flock to carry on without him?

“If they need G. here all the time to hold their hand, then this community is lost,” said Gangster, 24, as he stood on Clarence Street in his best Pendleton shirt and shiny brown wingtips.

For Boyle, who has had to view all this from a distance, the last few months have brought an avalanche of emotions.

Fully expecting to return to the community next summer, he said he was heartbroken to learn that his superiors had other plans. Although he believes that his calling is on the Eastside--a place where he has said he wants to grow old and die--he is also quick to emphasize that he will be forever obedient to a religious order known for its stringent tests of faith.

“It’s a great loss to me, yet obedience is my peace, really,” Boyle, 38, said in a telephone interview during which he struggled to keep his voice from choking. “It’s excruciating . . . but I’m a Jesuit first, not some generic gang worker in the L.A. area.”

He is pained to hear that the young men in whom he invested so much have been unable to maintain order. More than that, however, he worries that he is being deified for deeds he believes are within the grasp of everyone in the community.

“To say I am indispensable and have to be returned for the betterment of the community is a false assessment. I’ve never felt it, I’ve never said it, I’ve never thought it,” he said. “Obviously, I think I’d be helpful if I was there. But anybody who thinks the cause of any kind of problem is me leaving, and the solution is me returning, just isn’t in touch with reality.”

There has been some speculation that Boyle is being punished for his celebrity status, that the public attention he receives is frowned upon--especially in a town where Cardinal Roger M. Mahony has an anti-gang program of his own.

But Father Paul Belcher, the Los Gatos-based head of California’s Jesuit order, said there is no secret agenda for Boyle. He is merely going through the rigors of his tertianship, a spiritual journey required of all Jesuits before taking their final vows.

“To say that he was sent there by God, as if nothing could change without his presence, is kind of an exaggeration,” Belcher said. “We leave our mark and move on and hope people have caught the spark.”

Mahony declined to comment, saying it was an internal Jesuit matter.

The people of Pico-Aliso, where eight gangs are jammed into the poorest parish in the Los Angeles archdiocese, seem to have caught Boyle’s spark. But the community’s problems are so entrenched that, even during the six years he was there, Boyle was forced to bury 26 victims of the carnage he preached against.

In one breath, residents talk of the lessons they learned from Boyle; how he taught them to view gang members as wounded children, not hostile invaders, who need the help of caring adults. A moment later, they speak of an impending blood bath that only Boyle’s return can avert.

Some of the young men wreaking havoc acknowledge that they are letting down Boyle by undermining his hard work. But even when his name is invoked, they seem incapable or unwilling to break the cycle they have sparked.

“The only communication we have now is by shooting each other,” lamented Mario Martinez, 22, a former gang member who credits Boyle with steering him in the right direction. “Everybody here cares about that man, but it’s the same thing as if somebody dies--when you’re gone, you’re gone.”

Despite the tumult, the fruits of Boyle’s labor are still evident throughout the blue and lavender housing project, where rancheras blare from car stereos and drying laundry hangs outside back doors.

Next to the church stands the brightly colored day-care center Boyle paid gang members to build. It is conspicuously unmarked by the graffiti--some of which is spelled out in six-foot-high letters--that seem to bathe every other wall in the neighborhood.

Boyle’s employment program, the tool he considered most effective at stopping bullets, is still alive--as is the Homeboy Tortilla shop he helped set up in Grand Central Market. If anything, church leaders say, the program has become more institutionalized, with employers paying the salaries instead of Boyle, who constantly hustled for donations to put more gangsters on the payroll.

To urge an end to the violence, the Pico-Aliso mothers have held “love walks” at night--the kind of grass-roots mobilization that would have made Boyle proud. In fact, some community leaders see the anguish over Boyle’s departure as a kind of cathartic release, leaving residents empowered to get back to the business of taking ownership of their lives.

“Rather than saying: ‘When Father Greg comes back, everything will be OK,’ I’d rather say: ‘Greg did a very good job, but now we have to go out and do it ourselves,’ ” said Father Pete Neeley, Boyle’s replacement as pastor. “That’s my key issue and it was Greg’s too--getting the people themselves to take responsibility so they aren’t dependent on one person.”

Yet this was one person unlike any other.

In a postage stamp-size community that has been carved into fragments by deadly rivalries, he was a Gandhi-like hero who could bring together its disparate elements. On streets that had been surrendered to gun-toting teen-agers, he was a fearless guardian who did not hesitate to thrust himself into the middle of a shootout. To youngsters written off by society, he was a caring but unrelenting father who showered his adopted offspring with affection but shamed them when they strayed.

“Since Greg is gone, we’ve been totally falling apart,” said Pam McDuffie, a longtime community leader whose husband heads the Pico Gardens Resident Advisory Council. “We need him to put us back together.”

Neeley, by his own admission, does not have Boyle’s calling to minister full time to the community’s gangs. Although Neeley insists that they have not been forgotten, he concedes that without Boyle, “it’s not as dramatic . . . the personality is not there . . . it’s not as glamorous anymore.”

Some residents, worried that Boyle was neglecting his other priestly duties, are relieved to have a more traditional pastor. But those with a stake in the project’s volatile gang dynamics say it will take years for someone else to earn the same stripes as Boyle, who traversed the neighborhood every night on a beach cruiser the homeboys bought him for his birthday.

“Being a priest was the second thing they respected about Father Greg,” said Johnny Odom, director of the Aliso Pico Multipurpose Center. “The first thing they respected was him--the person.”

Many believe that Boyle could have mediated the dispute between Cuatro Flats and the Mob Crew, two gangs that were rarely far from his embrace. If Boyle was around, the church doors would probably still be unlocked at night, his office still a safe haven and the telephone still available for collect calls from jail.

No one has been killed in his absence, but shootings have become a daily occurrence, sometimes a broad-daylight occurrence--such as last week, when cross-fire seriously wounded a pizza deliveryman. Several months ago, residents were shaken by a rooftop gun battle during which semiautomatic assault rifles blasted overhead for 15 minutes.

“Oh, I miss Father Greg,” said Jenny Hwang, owner of the liquor store at the 4th and Gless streets. “He stay here--no problem. He left--too much fighting.”

More than anything, the hope that Boyle imparted--that ability to show kids a future beyond a world of poverty and gang allegiances--has eroded. Residents tell the story of one teen-ager accused of a shooting they swear he did not commit. He sat in jail for months, protesting his innocence.

But without visits from Boyle, without an advocate urging him to remain strong and faithful, they say he grew tired. To the dismay of those who know him, the youth recently accepted a plea bargain and will be sentenced to prison for 11 years.

“Greg had that unmeasurable quality,” said Lt. Walter McKinney of the Los Angeles Housing Authority Police Department, which patrols the Pico-Aliso project. “The guy needs to be back there.”

When Boyle left Dolores Mission last summer, he was sent to Michigan, where he spent 30 days in silence. After he completes his service at Folsom on Sunday, he will spend the next three months working with Mexican inmates at a penal colony off the coast of Mazatlan.

Upon learning of his transfer, Boyle picked up the phone to tell his friends at Pico-Aliso, but he decided to stop calling because each conversation ended in tears. Now that the initial shock is over, the community has begun to organize, seeking some way to bring him back.

Last week, a group of residents and gang members called Belcher, and with the telephone speaker on, took turns protesting his decision. They persuaded the Jesuit leader to visit them in February.

At another meeting a few days later, they drafted a petition urging Boyle’s return. There is talk of preparing a video, in which residents could deliver testimonials about the important role Boyle played in their lives.

“I’m in a very difficult position, so I need not to be involved in what they’re doing,” Boyle said. “But I think it’s a real testament to how empowered they’ve become . . . that they are the owners of their church and they’re going to call the shots.”

In the meantime, however, the shooting continues. One youth proudly boasts about some kind of hand-held grenade launcher--a device he calls “the cannon”--that he and his gang have been using to take aim at their rivals.

During an evening interview last week, gunshots exploded outside an Aliso Village apartment, sending its occupants scrambling for cover and diving for the light switch. “Oh, Lord!” cried McDuffie, the community activist, who had been there visiting a group of gang members. “See what our children have to live with?”

Vince Ibarra, 20, would probably be considered one of Boyle’s success stories. Known as “Wizard” to his homies, he has been working steadily at LIFE, a food distribution network bank for the needy, which Boyle persuaded to take a chance on some gang members.

Yet Ibarra, who has a girlfriend and young son, is as concerned as anyone about the deteriorating tone in his neighborhood. Maybe with time, someone will emerge to fill Boyle’s shoes, he says, or the community will begin to take greater control of its own fate.

But with lives at stake, who can afford to wait?

“Father Greg’s like our God right here--we don’t have to believe no further,” he said. “People did depend on him, but if it’s going to work, why not?”