You don’t know what the Rev. Edward J. Flanagan—the famous “Father Flanagan” who founded Boys Town—looked like. The picture above might be confusing, then, because you likely had a different memory of his appearance. But you’re thinking of Spencer Tracy, who played Father Flanagan in two different movies, not the priest himself.
If you get a chance to see the new documentary about Father Flanagan, “Heart of a Servant: The Father Flanagan Story,” which comes out next Tuesday, Oct. 8, you might be confused again. Is that… Jesus doing the voice-over? No, but the actor who has played the most recognizable Jesus of the past 20 years, Jonathan Roumie, is in fact the narrator and executive producer of the film.
Why so much interest now in a priest who has been dead for more than 75 years? Once upon a time, Father Flanagan—whose cause for canonization is proceeding in Rome—was up there with the beloved Archbishop Fulton Sheen and the odious Father Coughlin as a “media priest,” in terms of public attention and Catholic devotion in the United States. It was not for his erudition or eloquence that he was so known, however, but for his work with at-risk young men.
Born in 1886 in County Roscommon, Ireland, Flanagan immigrated to the United States in 1904, receiving a degree from Mt. St. Mary’s College in Emmitsburg two years later. After a brief stint at the New York archdiocesan seminary at Dunwoodie in Yonkers, N.Y., Flanagan developed pneumonia and took a yearlong absence, moving to Omaha, Neb., to live with his brother (a Catholic priest) and sister.
Flanagan then went to Rome to study for the priesthood, and after continued bouts of poor health was eventually ordained in 1912 in Innsbruck, Austria. His first assignments as a parish priest were back in Omaha, where he established a school for homeless youth in 1917. Four years later, he established another institute on a farm 10 miles outside the city for boys between the ages of 10 and 16—what would soon become known as “Boys Town.”
Boys Town would eventually grow to include more than 50 buildings—including dormitories for hundreds of boys, as well as a gymnasium, chapel and administration buildings—and almost 900 acres for outdoor recreation. It was ostensibly governed by the residents themselves, who elected governing officers and a mayor.
Father Flanagan’s famous phrase, “there is no such thing as a bad boy,” became a sort of catchphrase for Boys Town’s model of education and discipline, one markedly different from the “reform school” mentality of similar institutions at the time. His approach focused less on fear or strict discipline than on group activities, individualized plans of instruction and the creation of safe environments. “What Father Flanagan believed, and proved, was that the devastating effects of trauma in childhood can often be reversed with the right amount of support, love and care,” wrote Kevin Lawler in a 2017 essay for America.
Boys Town was also racially and religiously integrated. “Let the strength of understanding and love crush the foul seed of prejudice,” Flanagan once wrote. In a 2024 article in the Omaha World-News, Henry Cordes contended that “at a time segregation prevailed in America, both in the North and South, Father Flanagan may have established the country’s first fully integrated community.”
“He received death threats many times because he was without prejudice or discrimination, integrating Boys Town with blacks and kids of Jewish faith,” Stephen Wolf, the vice postulator of Father Flanagan’s cause for sainthood and a member of a Boys Town alumni group, told Omaha Magazine earlier this year. “The Ku Klux Klan once threatened to burn Boys Town down.”
Father Flanagan’s response? A simple question: “What color is a man’s soul?”
While the institution was well-known regionally by the late 1920s, it took Hollywood to make Flanagan and Boys Town national names. In 1938, Spencer Tracy (as Father Flanagan) and a teenage Mickey Rooney (as a seemingly incorrigible young crook) starred in “Boys Town,” which was partially filmed at the actual campus.
Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer wasn’t high on the film, which included “no sex” and “no songs.” But it became the second-highest-grossing film of 1938, and Tracy won the Academy Award for Best Actor. A review in America that year praised the movie for its combination of fact and fancy, noting that “the fiction which has been added is exciting and always appealing, though sometimes on a too sentimental basis.”
At the film’s premiere, Tracy said of Father Flanagan that “the great goodness and sweetness and beauty of the soul of this man shines even through me to you.” Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer wasn’t about to let the success of the film go to waste, and a sequel, “Men of Boys Town,” followed three years later, also starring Tracy and Rooney. Apparently sex and songs aren’t the only things that sell.
In the years following the release of the two films, Father Flanagan’s model for residential education for at-risk youths was replicated many times around the United States. The films also resulted in an enormous outpouring of financial support for Boys Town. An obituary in America estimated that more than 5,000 young men had graduated from the institution by the time Father Flanagan died of a heart attack in Germany in 1948.
Devotion to him—both in Nebraska and around the world—also grew over the years, and his cause for sainthood was officially opened in 2011. In 2019, the Father Flanagan League Society of Devotion, the group collecting materials that demonstrated Flanagan’s life of virtue, forwarded the “positio” on him to the Vatican, marking the next step in what is usually a long process toward the recognition of sainthood. He now holds the title “Servant of God.”
What of his legacy with regard to the care of at-risk youths? In a church still plagued by sex abuse scandals and with far less credibility with regard to the care of at-risk children, Boys Town remains a success still today. Now coeducational, the institute operates nine facilities across the United States, serving more than 35,000 youths and families a year.
Father Flanagan “was inclusive and reached out to people who were on the margins,” Bishop Kevin Doran of Elphin, Ireland, told The Tablet last year. “He is someone that can inspire us and that we can say we are proud of. It doesn’t change the fact that bad things happened in the Church and in our society. But I think that it gives us a model or an example to follow and it says that it is actually possible to do things in a much better way.”
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Our poetry selection for this week is “Gibbous Moon,” by Alfred Nicol. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
Poet, feminist and nun: Sister Madeleva Wolff
Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Who’s in hell? Hans Urs von Balthasar had thoughts.
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
