Jesuit Father Greg Boyle knows that some people don’t like his anecdotes. They want hard facts to support his claim that jobs turn gang lives around.

Father Boyle, who provides direction and employment in Los Angeles through his nonprofit anti-gang Homeboy Industries, shrugged as he spoke to those packed into the St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Newman Center, off the California State University, Chico, campus.

“Do you need evidence that loving your children makes a difference?” the Jesuit priest asked. “Gang members don’t want to work, culture tells you. My experience tells me differently.”

Father Boyle’s message wasn’t just academic. Gang-related violence is a reality in this growing city of roughly 75,000 people, according to city police.

The priest wove anecdotes through his Newman Center talk the evening of April 19, and again the next day before a standing-room-only crowd in a 500-seat campus theater.

He talked about the young men he called his heroes, ones who had changed their lives, traded their baggy “Dickies for Dockers,” removed their tattoos and learned the skills that got them jobs.

Repeating a phrase like a personal litany of the saints — “It’s the privilege of my life to know,” — Father Boyle introduced stories about ex-gang members like Carlos, who told him after the first day at a legitimate job: “It feels proper. Yeah, I’m holding my head high.”

He also talked about a young man named Roman who took his four-year-old daughter to the first apartment they could call their own. She whirled around the living room exclaiming, “My home!”

Father Boyle told the ex-gang member how proud he was of the hard-fought changes he made.

“You did this. You’ve never had a home in your life and now you do. You’ve never had a father in your life and now you are one.”

A few weeks later, as Roman was unloading the trunk of his car, someone shot him. What’s the point of doing good, Father Boyle was asked at the funeral, if that can happen to you?

“Here’s the point,” he said. “In the last months Roman came to know the truth of who he was, of who God wanted him to be. He became that truth, he inhabited it. No bullet can pierce that, no four prison walls can keep it out, and death can’t even touch it.”

The priest asked the audience to “realize that we’re in this together…We belong to each other.”

He said he has felt that sense of belonging intimately since he was diagnosed about a year and a half ago with leukemia.

“It’s been a time of deep kinship and tenderness, and a constant reminder of how blessed I am to have been in that community,” he said.

He said that the treatments he receives every four weeks are going well, and that he continues to work full time at his non-profit organization.

Community groups and churches in Chico are taking steps to counter the pull of gangs. The Boys and Girls Club of Northern California, for example, recently won a grant to begin an anti-gang program, an official with the organization said.

Father Boyle said that those kinds of programs can be very helpful, but cautioned that the least effective anti-gang tactics are information-laden ad campaigns that rarely keep kids away from risky behavior.

“We think it’s about giving information but it’s not,” he said in reply to a mother who asked for advice during his Newman Center talk.

“It’s about inserting the message here,” he said, pointing to his heart. “It’s about nurturing children, paying attention, walking with (them) and especially delighting in them.”

Children who are treated that way by adults start to recognize themselves as important in the world, Father Boyle said.

“You have to reach in and find where the pilot light is and stoke it.” Ignite their imaginations, he said, until they see that they are “the shape of God’s heart.”

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