Providence, TV Show, Texan Bless Parish

The Lord, it is often said from the pulpit, works in mysterious ways--to which the Dolores Mission Catholic Church in East Los Angeles can add a hearty amen.

In two dizzying weeks, the little parish was rewarded by a television quiz show with a sense of fair play, bedeviled by a thief who looted the church strongbox and made whole again by a Texas businessman who reads People magazine.

“Providence,” said the parish priests, groping to explain the succession of events at Dolores Mission.

The stucco church ministers mainly to illegal immigrants and gang members, hardly a rich constituency. Thus, parishioners were especially giddy when Father Tom Smolich--in a last-ditch effort to raise funds for a child-care center--appeared on “Jeopardy!” and in four appearances that concluded a week ago Tuesday won nearly $40,000.

Early Wednesday morning of this week, the fortunes turned. A thief robbed a safe of $12,000 in savings earned by homeless immigrants who are allowed to sleep in the church. Parish priests suspect that the theft might be the work of one of the young gang members who are given free run of the facilities.

Finally, on Wednesday night, there came a call from a Texas businessman who, having read about the “ ‘Jeopardy!’ priest” in People magazine, offered to raise an additional $65,000 to help establish the child-care center. When the businessman heard about the stolen $12,000, he offered to pay for most of that out of his own pocket.

“That’s the way things work around here,” said Father Gregory Boyle, the pastor, trying to explain it all. “There’s never enough money around here, yet, somehow it’s always there when we need it.”

While expressing doubt that “God fixes game shows,” quizmaster Smolich said: “We’ve been tremendously blessed. . . . We’re generous with what little we have. A lot of times it nearly kills us. But somehow it always comes back to us.”

The parish members, most of them residents of the neighboring public housing projects, have organized themselves into a dynamic community force. Parishioners have marched through nearby drug-infested streets to demand more police protection and gotten it.

Defied Federal Government

Two years ago, parishioners defied the federal government and declared their church a sanctuary for homeless, undocumented immigrants. Since then, young members of the parish have taken up weekly collections of food, which parish women prepare in their homes, to feed the homeless immigrants at the church.

About 100 men sleep on the church floor each night. Most spend their days standing at crowded street corners where day laborers gather each morning in search of work. While the offer from the Texan businessman--he owns a color printing firm--to cover losses has raised their spirits, they said they are not counting on it until they see it.

For many, the money stolen from the church rectory represented months of back-breaking work and of sleeping on the church floor to save what little they could to send back home to relatives.

For Jorge Solis, 20, of Guatemala it also means he will not be able to return home next month as planned to visit his ailing mother. Solis said pain shot through him when Boyle announced the bad news to the men Wednesday. It took Solis a year of work in downtown garment factories and in Arizona agricultural fields to save the $1,800 he lost in the theft.

“It makes you want to scream or cry,” added a young man from Mexico who in Spanish identified himself only as Elias and said he lost more than $800. “You go hungry, sleep badly, even risk your life . . . for something like this to happen.”

“I don’t understand how anyone would take the money we’ve worked so hard for,” Solis said. “Whoever did this must have been pretty desperate.”

Boyle suspects one of the more troubled gang members who frequents the church and who may have been plagued by serious problems at home.

‘Want to Help’

“We’ve put the word out in the community that we just want to talk. . . . We want to help the person who did it, not punish him,” said Boyle, who has not reported the crime to police.

Boyle’s attitude reflects the parish’s controversial approach toward gang members that police have labeled naive and that, at times, has raised doubts among some parishioners.

“Love them into submission” is Boyle’s strategy for dealing with young gang members.

The parish runs an alternative school for about 50 of the youngsters, most of them dropouts from regular schools. And the church grounds have become a regular gathering place for youngsters from the nearly dozen gangs in the neighborhood. In the evenings, dozens gather in the church parking lot and in a converted garage that the parish has furnished with a television set and weight-lifting equipment. Some have even joined church discussion groups or volunteered to serve meals to the men who sleep at the church.

Gang members have organized a carwash at the church for Sunday to raise money for the men who lost their savings in the church theft.

While police and some people in the community accuse the church of protecting gang members, parish leaders say their approach is working. They note that gang warfare and drug dealing have diminished in the neighborhood since parishioners began working with the gangs.

Police, however, credit the “dramatic decrease” in crime to stepped-up police patrols.

Called Risky

Hollenbeck Division Capt. Jerry Burns said the parish’s approach to gangs is a risky undertaking. And there is some resentment among officers who perceive the priests as protecting gang members, he said.

Still, Burns added in a personal aside, “as a private citizens and as a Catholic, I think he (Boyle) is doing exactly as Christ would have us do.”

The parish wants to establish its child-care and job-training center facility, a longtime dream of Smolich and others in the parish.

Last year, the dream seemed a long way from fulfillment, Smolich recalled.

“We had no money.”

Then while reading a newspaper, an ad for the game show “Jeopardy!” caught his eye. “I figured, ‘why not?’ ” said Smolich, recalling a childhood fantasy of appearing on the show.

His first stint on the show last December was disappointing. He finished second on his first day.

But Smolich got a chance for redemption this summer after game show officials determined that Smolich’s competitor erroneously had been given credit for a wrong answer.

This time, there was no defeating Smolich--a self-admitted trivia buff and avid reader--who breezed through three days of questions like: Which was the third largest country (Poland) in Europe in 1704, which by 1793 had disappeared from the face of the map?

He was stumped on the fourth day, but Smolich was not complaining. He had won $39,802, the seed money to buy the modular unit that will house the parish’s child-care center.

Sitting at the rectory dining room table late this week, the boyish-looking priest, wearing a black-and-orange San Francisco Giants T-shirt, mused about the parish’s good and bad fortunes.

“Somehow,” he said, “in the great workings of things, we’re doing something right here. God’s hand is in this.”