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" Richard Rohr is a theologian that I read. "

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" I founded Homeboy Industries in 1988 after I buried my first young person killed in our streets because of gang violence. "

" My church is in the detention facilities where I preside and celebrate the Eucharist. To me that's the church. That's the people of God. "

" I didn't take my vows to the LAPD. "

" You stand with the least likely to succeed until success is succeeded by something more valuable: kinship. You stand with the belligerent, the surly and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear. "

" People have to see that there is a high degree of complexity about belonging to a gang. It's a symptom, not a problem. "

" As a society, we come up lacking in many of the marks of compassion and wisdom by which we measure ourselves as civilized. "

" Abject poverty, political instability, torture, and other abuses push thousands across our border. There is not a deterrent imaginable that equals the conditions that force their migration. "

" I spent the summers of 1984 and 1985 as an associate pastor at Dolores Mission Church, the poorest parish in the Los Angeles archdiocese. In 1986, I became pastor of the church. "

" I do believe in lessons learned. I have learned that you work with gang members and not with gangs; otherwise, you enforce the cohesion of gangs and supply them oxygen. "

" We are among the handful of countries that has difficulty distinguishing juveniles from adults where crime is concerned. We are convinced that if a child commits an adult crime, that kid is magically transformed into an adult. Consequently, we try juveniles as adults. "

" The wrong idea has taken root in the world. And the idea is this: there just might be lives out there that matter less than other lives. "

" I think that any program that's born from below rather than on high is going to survive. "

" It has become an accepted tenet that kids will rarely listen to their parents but seldom fail to imitate them. Communicating the message has never been a good substitute for 'showing up' and embodying the message. "

" As much as I dislike the suggestion of single solutions to complex problems, jobs are as close as we will get to a single, effective answer to the enormous problem of gangs. "

" Our best selves tell us that 'there but for the grace of God... ' and that, in the end, there is no distance, really, between us and them. It is just us. Our best and noble hope is to imitate the God we believe in. The God who has abundant room in God's grief and heart for us all. "

" We can't get at crime unless we know what language it speaks. Otherwise, we are just suppressing the cough, not curing the disease. "

" The poor evangelize you about what's important and what is the Gospel, and that that's where the joy is. "

" Gangs are born of a lethal absence of hope, and hope has an address: 130 W. Bruno St. in Los Angeles, CA 90012. "

" I feel called to be faithful. "

" There is no 'them' and 'us.' There is only us. "

" I have never seen a hopeful person join a gang. "

" The power of community policing is in the relationship. This can happen only if an officer sticks around for a while. "

" If you are paying attention, then the day is going to be pretty joyful, and a lot of delight will fill it. "

" You are exactly what God had in mind when he made you. "

" We need a pope to oversee not simply a modernization of the church but its total transformation. "

" The draconian spirit that seeks to enhance penalties and to lower the age at which juveniles will be tries as adults, is part of the 'whole cloth' of three strikes. Our failure to address the depair of our inner-city youth is only delayed by our over-confidence in a stance that is 'tougher than thou.' "

" I know now that gang warfare is not the Middle East or Northern Ireland. There is violence in gang violence, but there is no conflict. It is not 'about something.' It is the language of the despondent and traumatized. "

" I love movies. "

" We need a pope to usher in a new era of inclusion, the end of a sinful clericalism, and a strong sense of duty to those on society's margins. The 1 billion faithful long for a leader who is fearless and driven - not by terror but by love. "

" What do we know to be true about gang violence? We know we will fail if we fixate on the symptoms and not address what undergirds it. "