More than 100 years after its founding, Boys Town continues to advance Venerable Father Edward J. Flanagan’s mission of caring for the vulnerable and underserved, reaching more than 2 million children and families every year.
The Irish-born priest is revered for his revolutionary approach to caring for homeless children in the 20th century, leading him to be declared “Venerable” by Pope Leo XIV in March, 2026.
Following the advancement of Flanagan’s canonization cause, Thomas Lynch, who serves as the historian and director of community programs for Boys Town, told EWTN News that the priest’s life serves as an example of “how children can be treated and how to treat your fellow man too.”
“Venerable Father Flanagan was born and raised in Ireland in a very devout Catholic family, and he had a great devotion to helping people from the examples of his mother and father,” Lynch said.
He was born in County Galway in 1886, and moved to America in 1904. His journey through seminary was put on hold due to poor health, but he was eventually ordained in 1912.
While the priest is known for rescuing homeless children and housing them at Father Flanaganʼs Boys Home, his work went beyond aiding children at the village now known as Boys Town.
Flanagan had “special ideas and concepts in child care…that were so radical,” but it came “from his concepts of being a Catholic priest of love and dignity for the individual,” Lynch said. “It changed the way children were treated around the world.”
Flanagan was “a great champion for civil rights,” Lynch said. “He traveled across America advocating equality regardless of a personʼs race or religion. He felt that [was] one of the greatest stains in America — any type of religious or racial discrimination.”
“Many people donʼt realize he went out of his way to help Japanese Americans during World War II. During the internment, he helped around 200 to 300 of them leave the camps and begin new lives, and he brought a number of them to live in the village of Boys Town.”
Creating Boys Town ‘with love’
“When Father Flanagan created Boys Town in 1917, unfortunately, in America, there were no child care programs existing that were standard across the country,” Lynch said. “There were reform schools,” but they were “terrible places.”
In the schools, “children would commit suicide because the guards would be so violent,” he said. Many of the children were also in orphanages, but “when you became a teenager, you were expelled.”
To combat the issue, Flanagan “came forward and said: ‘Theyʼre going to live with me. Theyʼre going to have love, education, a spiritual life, and be taught a trade. Itʼll be done. No corporal punishment. No verbal abuse. Theyʼll live as a family.’”
To start Boys Town, Flanagan used “the borrowed $90 he had,” Lynch said. “He had no money and no one really believed in him except for a few people in the city of Omaha.”
“But he always said: ‘God would provide.’”
At Boys Town, “he created one of the first intentionally integrated communities in America…and he did it all with love,” he said. “He referenced love almost every day, in every sermon, and in every prayer.”
Flanagan’s success caught the attention of people across the globe, leading his life and legacy to be immortalized in the 1938 movie “Boys Town,” starring Spencer Tracy, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of the priest.
Flanagan’s work was also esteemed by multiple presidents and leaders.
“President Franklin Roosevelt said America needed 49 more Father Flanaganʼs, one for every state and territory, because his ideas were so far forward and proving successful,” Lynch said.
In 1947, Flanagan was even invited by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who was leading the allied occupation of Japan, to review the child welfare conditions in Japan and Korea.
After the trip, Flanagan culminated a report, “Children of Defeat,” which included findings on the devastating conditions of children left homeless and abandoned by World War II across Asia. He presented it to President Harry Truman at the White House on July 11, 1947.
Flanagan was also invited to do a similar assessment in Austria and Germany the following year, but while in Germany Flanagan suffered a heart attack and died on May 15, 1948.
Following his death, Flanagan’s successors continued many of the same principles and practices of his celebrated work.
Flanagan’s principles still present today
Flanagan often said, “‘I do not have all the answers on child care,’ but he learned from every child that came to him, and he did extensive research with children and families,” Lynch said.
Boys Town now operates nine sites including its home campus in Nebraska and locations in Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Nevada, and New England.
“Itʼs the largest residential care facility in America” with “300 boys and girls living with us,” Lynch said.
The “programs we serve touch the lives of around 2 million children and families every year across the United States, through our medical programs, our counseling programs, [and] our psychiatric programs.”
“We do strategic planning, and we review our programs about every five years and determine whatʼs the next area we should move into based on whatʼs going on in society,” he said.
Boys Town offers in-home family services, “where we actually go into a home and work with a family that are having issues,” he said. It provides “foster care programming,” which “trains foster parents across America in the basic theories and concepts of Father Flanagan.”
To help students, Boys Town operates its Well-Managed Schools. Lynch said: “We teach schools and students the concepts of Father Flanagan — of respecting each other and how to get along in the classroom.”
Boys Town’s National Research Hospital offers aid and specialized care. It is conducting “advanced work on autism and Parkinsonʼs disease,” and “working with special MRI machines,” Lynch said.
The organizaiton also started a residential treatment center to help families struggling with a troubled child who is experiencing behavior problems.
It’s for “boys and girls that canʼt live at home because…maybe theyʼre violent or have severe mental issues,” Lynch said.
Cause for canonization
“The cause for father began many years ago, some of our alumni felt that Father Flanagan should be a saint in the Catholic Church.”
“When he created Boys Town, he created it on his Catholic theology, his training in his life,” Lynch said. “It is an example to the world of what Catholic teaching and theology can do to help the lives of not just children, but society.”
“He took the Catholic tenets of love, inclusion, and acceptance, and he brought that to the care of children in America, when really no one had even thought of it before,” Lynch said.
In “2012, a Mass was held at Boys Town on Saint Patrickʼs Day, and thatʼs when the Archdiocese of Omaha officially opened Father Flanaganʼs cause.”
Pope Leo XIV declared the “heroic virtue” of Flanagan alongside four other holy men and women on March 23, 2026.
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