Current and former gang members have long come to Homeboy Industries to get their lives back on track, in part lured by their trust in Father Greg Boyle, a Jesuit priest who founded the nonprofit nearly 40 years ago.
On Tuesday, Homeboy Industries acquired the Monastery of the Angels, a hidden oasis in the Hollywood Hills where cloistered Dominican nuns lived for nearly 90 years before vacating the site in 2022.
Homeboy plans to turn the 4-acre Spanish Colonial Revival property into a 60-bed community where the formerly incarcerated and gang-involved can sleep and heal.
The site, to be named Home of the Angels, will provide 50 beds for substance abuse treatment and an additional 10 for people experiencing acute mental health issues. There will also be outpatient services to treat addiction and mental health.
Boyle said that by keeping people within Homeboy for all their services, there’s a better chance they will succeed.
“They’ll go, ‘Oh it’s Homeboy,’ ” Boyle said. “They will feel seen here, just as they are” at our headquarters.
The Monastery of the Angels has a storied history.
In 1924, a group of Dominican nuns founded the monastery. Ten years later, supported by some of L.A.’s wealthiest families including the Dohenys and Hancocks, they purchased a sprawling estate in Beachwood Canyon that belonged to a copper mine owner and moved in.
Local Catholic women raised funds to build the nuns a new cloister, chapel and office complex on site in 1948, the buildings designed by celebrated architect Wallace Neff.
It’s those structures that stand today. For years, neighbors have come to pray at the chapel and purchase the sisters’ renowned pumpkin bread and candy. But mirroring a national trend of shrinking religious orders and congregations, the last nuns left in 2022.
Sister Joseph Marie of the Child Jesus, who is prioress of the Dominican Sisters of the Monastery of the Angels, said in choosing whom to sell the site to, the nuns “felt a deep responsibility to entrust it to a steward whose mission reflected our own values.”
