Who was Venerable Father Flanagan, Boys Town founder?

By Deacon Omar F.A. Gutierrez, OSV News

(OSV News) -- In the early 1940s, a young boy sought out Father Edward Flanagan as he toured the East Coast with an entourage of boys from the "town of little men" he had founded in Omaha, Nebraska. The boy, who had suffered a great deal in his brief life, had arranged to ask if he could come to live in Boys Town.

After the initial meeting, he was allowed to join Father Flanagan and his boys at a fancy state dinner given in their honor. The lad had never eaten at such a table, however. There were more plates, bowls, glasses and utensils than he knew what to do with. When the salad was served, he sat there perplexed and self-conscious, not daring to move lest his ignorance show and he be made fun of.

Across the long table, though, the boy's concern caught the attention of Father Flanagan, who met the boy's eyes with his own. Father Flanagan slowly and deliberately picked up the salad fork and indicated without a word that the boy should do the same. The bright child felt a wave of relief come over him, and he followed the priest's lead.

Many years later, when that boy related this story, he said he felt seen and cared for in a way he hadn't been in a long time, for Father Flanagan saw his pain and loved him from the other end of what seemed like another world altogether.

"Heart of a Servant: The Father Flanagan Story," a documentary film released in the fall of 2024, tells, in many ways for the first time, the fuller story of the life of this remarkable Irish American priest whose cause for canonization is underway. The film provides not just the outline of Father Flanagan's life and the incredible impact he had, then and now, throughout the world; more importantly, it explains the spiritual foundation of his heroic work for the poor, a work he pursued throughout his life.

Edward Joseph Flanagan was born July 13, 1886. The midwife did not give the child much of a chance. In the family's stone hovel outside a small town in County Roscommon, Ireland, the sickly newborn's grandfather grabbed him, tucked him between his chest and his coat, and rocked him before the fire that night. The baby boy would survive that first trial. He would survive a convulsion a few weeks later that turned him purple. He would survive many more battles with his health and other challenges in the coming years as he pursued the Christian life, shaped by his parents and by their lived Catholic culture.

He came to the United States in 1904 at the age of 18 -- not to find fortune but, at the suggestion of his family, which had already started to move here, to study for the priesthood in America rather than in Ireland.

In 1906 he began his studies at St. Joseph's Seminary in Dunwoodie in Yonkers, New York, for the Archdiocese of New York, and he fell ill soon after. Edward's health was never excellent, but the acuteness of this illness was due to the young seminarian's insistence on caring for the forgotten who languished alone in the tuberculosis wards of Hell's Kitchen. Other seminarians were involved as well, but Edward felt a distinct calling to be close to them, to serve those who couldn't interact with the outside world and those who wished to communicate with loved ones.

He visited as often as he could, telling the bedridden the news and volunteering to write letters to family back in Ireland or other places. But the difficult New York winter, along with his regular exposure to the sick and his constant studies, left him drained. Weakened by coughing attacks, he was forced to try to finish his courses while bedridden.

The sickly young man was eventually released from his studies and then from the Archdiocese of New York in order to join his older brother, Father Patrick Aloysius Flanagan, who was a priest of the then-Diocese of Omaha, Nebraska. After several other fits and starts at study, Edward was finally ordained a priest in 1912.

Father Flanagan's servant heart was called upon right away. The Easter Day tornado that devastated Omaha in 1913, the various droughts that made farmhands into what he called "floating families" as they searched for work, and the transient workmen who traveled through Omaha over the next couple years put the young priest in contact with many suffering people.

By 1915, Father Flanagan was assigned to the Workingman's Hotel, a place he had helped erect with the St. Vincent de Paul Society of Omaha for the temporary housing of transient men coming in and out of the city in search of seasonal labor. He was not content just to house these men or run a flophouse. Rather, he endeavored to provide them with the skills, connections and hope to be able to end their transient lifestyles. However, listening to their sad stories, he came to realize that their wounds began at a very young age.

One evening in 1917, a boy in ragged clothes begged to be allowed to stay at the hotel for a night. "Just give me a corner," the boy with flushed cheeks said. "I'll be satisfied." It was cold outside, so Father found a bed for him, isolated from the men, and fed him. That night, he knelt down and prayed, thinking of his own upbringing in Ireland and of his loving parents. God, he said, "opened (his) eyes" to the great need of other young boys and to what would be his great calling.

Shortly after this, Father Flanagan went to the juvenile courthouse and found several young boys, ages 12 to 15, before a judge. He convinced the judge to release the boys into his own care, and so started what would eventually become Boys Town. Father would continue this work through much personal and public tribulation until his death in 1948 while on mission to spread his "gospel of love" to postwar Germany. The cause for his canonization was opened in the Archdiocese of Omaha in 2012.

In Father Flanagan's time, American society was much taken with the theory of eugenics, which insisted that what made people behave badly, what made them poor, what kept the "lower classes" low, was a genetic makeup that made them "unfit." There was, then, nothing to do for street boys or non-whites but commend them to their fate. And though there were orphanages for the very young and homes for adolescent girls, the fate of adolescent boys from impoverished and dysfunctional backgrounds was almost inevitably homelessness, crime and a penal system that put 14-year-old boys in Leavenworth Prison and sent some of them only slightly older to the electric chair.

In the midst of this culture, Father Flanagan proved to be a man of both wisdom and the Holy Spirit. He spoke out against the many injustices of racial segregation. He decried the use of the death penalty. He openly criticized the government for interning Japanese Americans during World War II. But he was never satisfied with merely speaking out. His prophetic witness was to demonstrate through Boys Town the power of an essentially Christian culture, one built on the principle that every child is at heart good, made by his creator with a capacity for goodness that would not be beaten into him by adults with batons. Rather, each boy's inherent goodness would be modeled for him by his peers, boys just like them.

Father Peter Dunn, a young priest of the Archdiocese of Omaha who was assigned in 1944 to work with Father Flanagan at Boys Town, was amazed by his care for so many -- but more than that, he was amazed at his prayer life. No matter how early Father Dunn got up in the morning, he could never beat Father Flanagan to the chapel. Father Dunn found him there every day, on his knees, praying before sunrise.

Father Flanagan's Mass was also early in the morning, and he had a rotation of Catholic boys serve the Mass for him. After Mass, each of the servers would receive a blessing from Father Flanagan before he was released for his day's chores and studies. One day, one server had chosen not to receive Communion. So, when it came time for his blessing, Father Flanagan blessed him, put his hand on the lad's shoulder, and said, "Dear, don't you know that you have everything you need here to become a saint?" Here, Father Flanagan revealed his true mission.

Boys Town was never primarily an effort to overthrow systems, though that is exactly what ended up happening to childcare systems both in the United States and abroad. No, the work at Boys Town was an outgrowth of Father Flanagan's deep love of Jesus, of his prayer life, of his identity as a man ordered to Christ and ordered more specifically to the servant ministries of Jesus, which include the proclamation of the Good News to the poor and the defense and care of the vulnerable.

Through it all, Father Flanagan's deepest hope was that his boys would strive for sanctity, the true standard of all human fulfillment. So, whether it was a patient in a tuberculosis ward, a boy suffering from awkwardness at a table of abundance, or that boy who came to him looking for a corner out of the cold, Father Flanagan's heart was always moved to love, to comfort, to inspire the other to hope because his heart was ordered to Jesus.

When Father Flanagan died, and the paeans began to pour in, they came from religious and civic leaders across the country. The editor of the Protestant Christian Herald newspaper, Daniel Poling, wrote that Father Flanagan "loved and served beyond the barricades of faith and race. … He loved freedom with a passion, and he wanted every group, every minority, every person to be free -- free to conquer an evil inheritance, free to develop a worthy character, free to be a man in God's image."

This was possible because Flanagan took his faith seriously, the faith that teaches we are all made in the image and likeness of God and that we are made to worship him and can never be fully ourselves until we do. "Pray," Father Flanagan taught his boys, "for prayers work miracles."

In who he was and what he did, Father Flanagan is an icon of the power of diaconal identity. It both shows us and makes effective now the power of Christ the Servant. Where Father Flanagan saw pain, he rushed in and embraced the child of God who suffered. When he saw injustice, he spoke out eloquently and forcefully called others to greater charity in Christ.

But before any of that, he prayed. He identified himself with Christ Jesus and his love. Father Flanagan was, in the end, a priest who took his diaconal ordination so seriously that he allowed the Lord to use him in that role of service to the world. And the world is better for it.