By Brad Miner

It was originally called "The City of Little Men," when the Irish-born Fr. Edward J. Flanagan founded the refuge for orphaned and troubled boys in 1917 at 25th and Dodge Streets in Omaha. It became Boys Town a few years later when Fr. Flanagan purchased a farm - a necessary investment since the number of boys under his care had grown from a few to a few hundred. By the 1960s, the population of Boys Town peaked at 880.

A new documentary film - premiering October 8th in one-night-only, nationwide Fathom Events screenings - seems intended to boost the cause of Servant of God Fr. Flanagan's canonization. Surely, it will help, as people see the documentary, are inspired by the great man's story, and begin to pray for his intercession.

Edward Joseph Flanagan was born in 1886 in Leabeg, County Roscommon, emigrated to the United States in 1904, and was educated at Mount St. Mary's College in Maryland, after which he went to Dunwoodie, as we New Yorkers call it: St. Joseph's Seminary in the Dunwoodie section of) Yonkers, NY, which in those days was known as the West Point of American seminaries.

He spent time at the Gregorian University in Rome in 1908 but was forced to take a break because of ill health. (He had been dealing with respiratory and cardiac issues since birth.) His journey continued in, of all places, the Royal Imperial Leopold Francis University in Innsbruck, Austria - in part because it was assumed the mountain air would be good for his lungs - and was ordained there in 1912.

He returned to America and joined his older brother, Patrick, also a priest, and his sister, Nellie, in Omaha.

Of course, Fr. Edward Flanagan is known not just for founding Boys Town but also for insisting, "There's no such thing as a bad boy." By that, he meant at birth. Some of the kids who came to him had done bad things. But he believed the reform-school model then popular just about everywhere - including in his native Ireland's borstals - was not only cruel but also ineffective in achieving true reform of a boy's character.

After World War II, Flanagan visited Ireland, where his fame preceded him. He was lionized as a great man, the pride of the Old Country, or was, that is, until he visited some of those borstals.

As Niall O'Dowd writes at Irish Central:

Those looking for the seeds of what later became the near destruction of the Irish church over child mistreatment and abuse would have found it in the clarion voice of Monsignor Edward Joseph Flanagan - the founder of Boys Town, made famous by the Spencer Tracy movie of the same name . . .

Perhaps those managing his visit to Ireland were unfamiliar with the philosophy Flanagan used at Boys Town - setting high expectations, treating the kids with respect, emphasizing education, sports, and comradery - which was wholly opposed to the draconian punishments in the reform schools his Irish hosts proudly showed him and by which was horrified. He said so publicly ("a disgrace to the nation"), and went from being hailed as a hero to being condemned as a traitor.

During the war, Msgr. Flanagan had also spoken out against the injustice of America's internment camps for U.S. citizens of Japanese heritage, and, after his aforementioned trip to Ireland, he visited Japan and Europe to lend his expertise to efforts underway to help parentless children, especially the Japanese victims of the two atomic blasts and the orphaned survivors of carpet bombing in Germany.

These trips took a toll on the man whose health had never been good, and he died of a heart attack in Berlin on May 15, 1948. He was 61.

Boys Town was never a utopia, and, after Flanagan's death, it too has had to deal with occasional moral lapses among those charged with caring for the boys - and girls. (Girls began being admitted in 1979.)

All that - the abuse that has sullied Catholicism everywhere - has nothing to do with Edward J. Flanagan. And, wonderful though the films were, Flanagan does not owe his popularity or his sai...