The Sins of the Synod with Jayd Henricks

By Randall Smith

But first a note: In today's podcast, Robert Royal and Jayd Henricks, former executive director of government relations at the USCCB and now president of Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal (and its substack What We Need Now) discuss Henricks' article "The Sins of the Synod" (we link to it today in our COMMENTARY section). It's an informative introduction to the concluding session of the Synod on Synodality which begins tomorrow. Click here for the podcast.

Now for today's column...

There are many kinds of prayer. The Catechism lists vocal prayer, meditation, and contemplative prayer. But we can add intercessory prayer, petitionary prayer, penitential prayer, prayers of thanksgiving, and prayers where we simply try to listen in silence to the promptings of the Holy Spirit.

People sometimes say that "somewhere" St. Augustine said: "He who sings prays twice." The problem is no one has ever found that "somewhere," so he likely didn't say it. But singing - chanting a psalm, for example - can also be a kind of prayer. We ask for things we need in prayer; we give thanks for gifts received in prayer; and we seek forgiveness for wrongs we have done or for things left undone.

Prayer, says the Catechism, "is both a gift of grace and a determined response on our part." In this sense, the sacraments are a form of prayer. We go to Confession; we confess our sins; we receive the graces of the sacrament; and we go forth to cooperate with those graces, resolving to do better. We make prayers during Confession, "O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended You…." But the whole act of confession is itself a prayer, in which we put ourselves before God and ask for forgiveness and grace.

So too, the liturgy is a form of prayer. We sometimes forget this and say things like: "Did you get a chance to pray after Mass?" or "I went early to Mass so I would have a chance to pray." It is good to pray before and after Mass, but we shouldn't forget that the Mass itself is a prayer.

As the Catechism says: "The liturgy is a participation in Christ's own prayer addressed to the Father in the Holy Spirit. In the liturgy, all Christian prayer finds its source and goal. Through the liturgy the inner man is rooted and grounded in 'the great love with which [the Father] loved us' in his beloved Son. It is the same 'marvelous work of God' that is lived and internalized by all prayer, 'at all times in the Spirit.'"

But then the question arises: If the Mass is a prayer - a participation in Christ's own prayer - what kind of prayer is it? Is it an active, vocal prayer, or is it a more silent, contemplative prayer? Or is it both?

Sometimes people try to fudge their answer, saying something like, "Being active at Mass is contemplative. People can pray contemplatively while they're belting out a hymn. You know St. Augustine said: 'When you sing, you pray twice.'" (Except he didn't.) Such people seem to think there shouldn't be even a moment of reflective silence in the whole Mass.

Keep going. Say more words. Sing another hymn, maybe two. Then go greet people. But be sure to make space in your day for quiet time to pray. When would there be time for that? Not during the Mass, it would seem. At some other time. Mass is a time to keep busy. Silence just makes people uncomfortable. So let's fill the silence with another hymn.

Or people fudge the other way and say: "If we sit here contemplatively, that is active participation. You don't have to do anything or hear the words to engage in 'active participation.'" We sit here quietly, in awe, "putting ourselves in the presence of God," letting the prayers of the Mass that we can't hear just wash over us as we pray silently and contemplate the beauty of what's being done by the priest. That's what the Church means by active participation."

Well, if the Church did mean that by "active participation," she wouldn't have made a point of requiring it (as though it wasn't happening) in a dogmatic constitution...

In a new Vatican Thing podcast, TCT’s Robert Royal speaks with Catholic author and commentator George Weigel about the final session of the Synod on Synodality, which begins later this week in Rome. This is just the first of many podcasts and columns The Catholic Thing will bring readers throughout October as the Synod reaches its conclusion. Don’t miss it.

By Auguste Meyrat

But first a note: TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal is in Rome. And in the next TCT podcast, filmed before he left, he discusses with George Weigel the month-long Synod on Synodality that begins at the Vatican this week. Click here to view (or listen to) their conversation.

Now for today's column...

Although many Americans focus on migration coming from south of the border, an even bigger issue has been the mass migration of Americans from blue states to red states in the past decade. Because of the high taxes, lack of social services, and worsening conditions for middle and working-class families, many residents from progressive bastions like California, New York, Illinois, and Minnesota have resettled in relatively conservative states like Florida, Tennessee, or my home state of Texas.

Beyond the changing demography, this migration has affected the culture and politics of the states involved, though not in the way most observers expected. Rather than turning red states purple, the influx of migrants from the blue states made the red states even redder. It's, therefore, more apt to view these newcomers more as embittered refugees escaping a failed state than colonists ready to spread their superior way of life to less civilized parts of the country.

In his new book, American Refugees: The Untold Story of the Mass Exodus from Blue States to Red States, former screenwriter and conservative columnist Roger Simon recounts the story of his own move from Los Angeles to Nashville: "Born a New Yorker, I had come to California as a young man of twenty-one for more than just endless summers and ocean waves. I wanted to be part of the film industry, to write and direct movies. And now here I was, in my seventies, running away to start a new life - of what kind and for what purpose? - in Tennessee."

After contending with an ideologically hostile environment for so many decades, the septuagenarian finally moves during California's draconian COVID lockdown. Although, like most newcomers, he expects to find a conservative utopia where common sense reigns, schools are not indoctrination centers, and people enjoy basic freedoms. Instead, he observes that his new home is at great risk of becoming like his old one: "Nashville and Tennessee would be a test case in this depressing process [of becoming Democrat] whose conclusion is nowhere near resolved."

Nevertheless, Simon quickly finds like-minded "refugees" like himself who form an unlikely coalition of populist conservatives who aim to challenge the complacency of the establishment Republican elite in Tennessee. While newcomers have more dynamism and savvy, their lack of history and unfamiliarity with the state puts them at a disadvantage, with some of the natives seeing them as modern-day carpetbaggers.

Simon eventually makes himself at home, not only connecting with a number of people in his new city but even rediscovering his Judaism due to the ubiquity of houses of worship in Nashville along with the hearty encouragement of his (mostly Christian) friends. His fight for a more conservative Tennessee isn't over by the end of the book, but he is optimistic about where the culture is headed.

In itself, American Refugees is a nice story about an older man making his final odyssey, but its real value is in what it represents. Innumerable parallels are reflected in other migrations happening in the West, specifically in the realm of religion. For, just as people are leaving the blue states for red states, Catholics have been leaving progressive parishes for more conservative ones.

Some of this has to do with the movement that Simon describes. Catholics from the churches in the blue states are now filling up the pews of churches in the red states. And just as Simon re-verted to his Jewish faith, many non-practicing Catholics are encouraged by the surrounding culture to re-vert and come to Mass again.

I've seen this firsthand here in North Texas. Otherwise generic parishes have...

By Anthony Esolen

I have consistently found that the most intolerant people I meet are those who have the word "tolerance" on their lips all the time. We should not take this as hypocrisy. It is not what the Pharisees do, who blow a trumpet before them when they are giving alms. That is to turn charity into a stage-play, so that they can earn the praise of men, and if that is what they want, that is what they will get. "Fit retribution," says Milton, "empty as their deeds."

It is rather, I think, a condition most peculiar to our age, and it has to do with an urgent desire not to feel the prickling of the sins we approve. Those who regularly and honestly engage in examining their consciences will not like what they find there. That is because we are all sinners, and we all fall short of the glory of God.

The saint is more assured of God's mercy than the ordinary sinner is, but he is also more careful not to offend, and more abashed when he does offend. He does not need a slogan from politicized arms of the Church to instruct him in tolerance. His own sins instruct him well enough.

I am speaking here of persons to be tolerated, not sins. We want physicians who love their patients and hate their cancers.

We must get it into our heads that sin is real just as diseases of the body are real. I walked about for nearly a month with a blood clot in my leg, not wanting to believe it was really there. But the clot was under no obligation to respect my wishes.

We Catholics believe that God has given the human soul a moral constitution: we thrive by what is objectively good, and we wither by what is objectively bad. Our moral diseases are under no obligation to respect our opinions about them.

Of course, when a man sins with full and clear awareness that what he is doing is wrong, he adds defiance or recklessness to the underlying sin. And in this sense, we may say that some measure of ignorance mitigates one's guilt when the whole of the act and all its circumstances are judged. But the sin itself remains, and it works its harm.

Imagine, then, someone who bears within him a grave moral disease, a sin that has become so habitual that he cannot imagine living without it, yet a sin that deforms his dealings with other people, especially those who he knows disapprove of the sin, even if they do not know he suffers from it.

He begins to preach "tolerance" to numb the sore. He is not necessarily conscious of his motive. It is a subcutaneous panic. If he were a businessman nearing the brink of insolvency, the same kind of motive might keep him from driving past his bank, or looking at his checkbook, and he might snap at anyone discussing the ethics of frugality and prudence in money matters.

But that does not suffice. The sore never really grows numb. The disease continues its work. Something in the soul cries out that things are wrong.

It stings the man into action; so he imputes evil motives to those who remind him of the sin, and he goes on a spirited attack against sins he does not commit, and even against moral dispositions that are good or neutral, so long as they can be confused with those sins. "Tolerance" is on his lips, with the snarl of a wounded animal.

And since man is a social creature, social to the core, the condition can become general. The society loudest in preaching "tolerance" is one whose characteristic sins have become intolerable. They are angry sores, red and raw.

Everybody can see them. But everybody must be persuaded that they are not what they are, or that they are natural and inevitable. The melanoma must be called a beauty mark.

In the early progress of this inner conflict, the tolerance of a society's characteristic sin and the rage against its opposite is a function of vanity and social fashions, as Uncle Screwtape suggests: "We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make e...

By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza

Can good fruit come from a bad tree? The recent declaration on Medjugorje from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) had to take up that question, at least indirectly. The Church has delayed directly facing questions about Medjugorje in recent decades.

The Catholic intuition is no: bad trees do not produce good fruit. That intuition is sound, as sound as the Sermon on the Mount:

Every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will know them by their fruits. (Mt 7:17-20)

Painful scandals have prompted another examination of what those words mean. Some hard thinking will be in order.

Perhaps the greatest fraudster in the history of the Church was Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ. Anyone who has visited a L'Arche house marvels at the good fruit. How distressing then the revelations about Jean Vanier!

The Nobel laureate Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo of East Timor led his people to freedom, but lives now in exile due to sexual abuse of minors. Bishop Belo won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996; Martin Luther King won it in 1964, but his promiscuous adulteries compromise his Christian witness.

It's not a clerical problem alone, of course. At his peak, Bill Cosby was perhaps the most famous man on the planet and most beloved for his wholesome portrayal of family and friendship. All that fruit hung off a predatory tree.

Some forty years after the alleged apparitions in Medjugorje began, the Vatican's nihil obstat was welcomed by the site's devotees. After much investigation and back and forth, pilgrimages there can proceed, and may even be encouraged. The good fruit of visits there is affirmed. But it has not been affirmed that the apparitions themselves are a good tree.

The Vatican still speaks of "alleged apparitions"; the DDF's Note withholds judgment on their authenticity:

Evaluating the abundant and widespread fruits, which are so beautiful and positive, does not imply that the alleged supernatural events are declared authentic. Instead, it only highlights that the Holy Spirit is acting fruitfully for the good of the faithful "in the midst" of this spiritual phenomenon of Medjugorje. . . .Moreover, the positive assessment that most of the messages of Medjugorje are edifying does not imply a declaration that they have a direct supernatural origin. Consequently, when referring to "messages" from Our Lady, one should always bear in mind that they are "alleged messages." (¶38)

While pilgrims to Medjugorje might be pleased, the visionaries themselves may not be. If there are problematic messages - which the Note examines in detail - then the problem cannot be with Our Lady. Either those messages are not real, the visionaries are not reliable, or - despite the good fruits - the whole phenomenon is not authentic.

When the Note advises that pilgrims "be strongly advised that pilgrimages are not made to meet with alleged visionaries" (¶41), it must be painful for them, especially those who operate nearby guesthouses.

So, the Vatican praises good fruits but does not affirm they grew on a good tree. To be sure, it does not say that the visions or visionaries are bad trees. Just ambiguous trees. Ambiguous trees do not appear in the Sermon on the Mount. But they do grow in the soil of history.

It is piously pleasing to say that holiness bears good fruit the world. See the fruits and search confidently for the saint. In his 1996 memoir, Gift and Mystery, on the fiftieth anniversary of his priestly vocation, St. John Paul the Great, affirmed just that:

My now long experience, amid so many different situations, has confirmed my conviction that priestly holiness alone is the soil which can nourish an effective pastoral activity, a true "cura animarum." The truest secret of authentic pastoral success does not lie i...

By Fr. Thomas G. Weinandy, OFM, Cap.

Pope Francis has made three seriously misleading statements recently. On September 13th, prior to leaving Singapore, he spoke to an interreligious group of young people at a Catholic junior college. He stated: "All religions are a path to arrive at God." He elaborated: "I will use an analogy, they are like different languages that express the divine."

He encouraged the young people of various religions to dialogue with one another. He noted: "There's only one God, and each of us has a language to arrive at God. Some are Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and they are different paths [to God]." Later, on September 17th, in a video message to an interreligious youth conference in Tirana, Albania, Pope Francis praised religious diversity as "a gift from God."

More recently, on September 24th, the Vatican released a statement that Pope Francis sent to an interreligious gathering for peace in Paris sponsored by the Sant'Egidio Community. Here he wrote of the importance of divine inspiration. "We need to keep meeting, to weave bonds of fraternity, and to allow ourselves to be guided by the divine inspiration present in every faith." The Italian renders it as the "divine inspiration [that] inhabits every faith." Pope Francis wants to be pastoral and ecumenical. Nonetheless, as he is frequently wont to do, his statements are ambiguous, and can easily lead to confusion.

While Vatican II did note, in its Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (Nostra aetate), that "The Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is true and good in these religions," the Council did not say that all religions were of equal salvific value. Moreover, except for Christianity and Judaism, other religions are, therefore, not inspired by the Holy Spirit. And thus, they contain error; error that locks those who hold such beliefs in darkness, a darkness from which it is difficult to escape.

Most importantly, to declare in an unnuanced way, that "all religions are a path to God," and so inspired, is to give voice to the words of the Devil. Such assertions insult the singularity of Jesus as the Son of God incarnate, and that in him alone does one find salvation. The Devil rejoices when Jesus is degraded and demeaned, for he cannot tolerate the truth that Jesus is the universal Savior and definitive Lord.

Importantly, unlike Jesus, the founders of other religions do not save from sin and the curse of death. Nor do they provide an enhanced relationship with God. The founders of other religions, such as Mohammed and Buddha, as "prophets," simply provide knowledge whereby one can relate to God "properly." Except for Judaism and Christianity, all other religions are, therefore, gnostic by nature. They dispel ignorance by providing what is thought to be saving knowledge.

In its 2000 Declaration Dominus Iesus, the then-Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, wished to identify flawed misunderstandings and erroneous conceptions of Jesus in relation to other "religious traditions of the world," which risked compromising "the evangelizing mission of the Church." Thus, Dominus Iesus professed, in accordance with Sacred Scripture and the Magisterium of the Church, that Jesus, as the Father's only begotten Son, is alone the fullness of divine revelation who singularly possesses the completeness of divine truth.

Likewise, being the Father's Spirit-anointed Son, Jesus taught the Gospel of salvation and through his saving passion and sacrificial death reconciled all to his Father. The Father, in the love and power of the Holy Spirit, raised Jesus from the dead, thus liberating mankind from sin's curse.

These conjoined saving acts on the part of Jesus and of his Father, both of whom acted in the Holy Spirit, established Jesus as the preeminent Savior of all, and the sole Lord of both Heaven and Earth. Consequently, Dominus Iesus declared that "Jesus Christ has a significance and a value for the human race and i...

By Michael Pakaluk

A question: when the Prefect of Rome in 258 demanded that St. Lawrence hand over the treasures of the Church (see here), had the saint thought about his reply already, or did he improvise it on the spot? Did he live his life regularly thinking that "poor persons are the Church's treasures" or were those treasures, as it were, not recognized even by him, until - in a moment of crisis - he was inspired to see them for what they were?

I want to ask Christians today, similarly, what is the treasure of your Christian life? What constitutes the wealth acquired by you through a life of service in the Kingdom of God? If you had sense, you wouldn't turn to your 401K, Cybertruck, or house in Aspen. You might more sensibly refer to your spouse, children, and grandchildren.

Maybe you would add your godchildren, or think of friends who became Christians or Catholics because of you. If you were in any way accomplished, you might think too of your achievements "for the glory of God" - heroism in battle, generosity in going through pregnancies, how you handled an important legal case, your excellence in your line of work, and so on.

But in which of these would a Christian's true wealth most consist?

Visible accomplishments reveal sharply the question I wish to raise here. You have heard of the 10,000-hour rule. A person typically becomes expert in something through devoting 10,000 solid hours of practicing it, which works out to about 3 hours a day for 10 years. Probably the rule needs to be tripled for noteworthy accomplishments: since, once you become an expert, you need to practice your craft for let us suppose 6 hours a day for another 10 years to become capable of exceptional achievement.

Well, the exact numbers are not important. I simply want to draw your attention to the great disproportion between the unseen, unglamorous, unheralded hours of practice - many thousands of them - and the hours of visible, celebrated achievement (maybe a few dozen). This disproportion seems built into the human condition.

Suppose that, as a Christian, while you were practicing you were also offering up those hours to God. Before you started practicing, and after you finished, you said a prayer. At daily Mass, you united your practice with the Eucharistic sacrifice, in intention. In daily prayer, you asked God for illumination and grace in figuring out how to improve: he was your "collaborator" throughout. Then you would have "booked" 30,000 hours of service to God.

To help clarify, suppose I asked a Christian athlete where his true wealth was, as a Christian, as regards his sport? Would it consist in how he glorified God in the championship - perhaps when he even pointed to the sky on television and gave credit to God - or would it be in those thousands of hours of self-abnegating, unseen practice? Which answer would be in the spirit of St. Lawrence?

The point can be generalized. Take husband and wife. Where is their true wealth as Christians in their dealings with each other? No doubt some romantic gesture that they long remember counts as wealth - the diamond studs, for instance, which he saved up for and surprised her with (wealth to him more than to her). Or her saying "yes," which never stops amazing him. But then as Golde sings in Fiddler there are the quiet deeds between them, which stand to such outstanding romantic gestures at least in a proportion of 10,000 to 1: "For twenty-five years I've washed your clothes/ Cooked your meals, cleaned your house/ Given you children, milked your cow."

"The poor you will always have with you." (Matthew 26:11) The beauty of these humble deeds is that they are always available. There is nothing fraught about them.

You practice 30,000 hours and then you lose the championship? No matter, your riches consisted in your "poor" deeds.

You are a craftsman who carefully completed the scrollwork and ornamentation on the high ceiling of a church which no one ever looks up to see, taking it for grante...

By Casey Chalk

"Because of the greatness of our city the fruits of the whole earth flow in upon us; so that we enjoy the goods of other countries as freely as our own," declared Pericles in his famous funeral oration to honor the Athenian dead and the glorious city for which they died. Many paeans could also be sung of the great cities of Christian history - Jerusalem, Rome, Constantinople, Paris, Vienna, Kiev - for which men of faith in ages past willingly shed their blood.

Yet for many conservative Catholics today, the city has lost its luster. It is, its critics argue, a den of crime and iniquity, but also the place where all the worst of liberalism and modernity are on display: social atomism, materialism, technological utopianism, and the self-aggrandizement of the managerial class. In the city, you can't even see the stars.

Given these very obvious evils, it's easy to forget how central the city has been to Christianity. Moreover, as Mike Aquilina argues in his new book Rabbles, Riots, and Ruins: Twelve Ancient Cities and How They Were Evangelized, Heaven itself is described as a city:

And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God prepared as a bride adorned for her husband; and I heard a great voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling of God is with men" (Revelation 21:1-3).

God could have made heaven a "big, happy farm, or an unspoiled forest," writes Aquilina, but he chose a city. Depending on our sentiments, we may be inclined to imagine Heaven as an unspoiled landscape with snow-capped mountains in the distance, akin to C.S. Lewis's description in The Great Divorce. But the metaphor Holy Scripture gives us is the city, a place that in its first-century context would have conjured up images both exciting and nauseating, given the overcrowded, unsanitary character of such places.

Christianity was, in the early centuries, a primarily urban development. The apostles and their counterparts took the Gospel first not to rural farms but to the great cities of the Roman Empire: Antioch, Ephesus, Smyrna, Corinth, and of course, Rome, where Sts. Peter and Paul were both martyred.

It made sense: Roman roads and uncontested control of the Mediterranean (Mare nostrum) made travel comparatively safe and easy, while Jewish synagogues, often the starting point for evangelism efforts, were common in municipal areas. And, of course, the cities were where the most people were, masses of gentiles who, as G.K. Chesterton opines in The Everlasting Man, were spiritually and intellectually exhausted by the false philosophies and mystery cults of the ancient world.

Apart from Judaism, that milieu of intellectual and religious thought - itself preeminently an urban phenomenon - served as Christianity's primary interlocutor in the first century, and, as Aquilina shows, even many Jews themselves, such as Philo of Alexandria, had been engaging with Greek thought for generations.

St. Paul quoted Greek writers and employed classical rhetoric; St. John's principal opponent was the heresy of Gnosticism, which was informed by pagan philosophy and mystery cults. If Christianity was going to wage spiritual war against the most powerful intellectual and spiritual forces of the ancient world and declare Jesus Christ as the true king, that battle would inevitably be an urban battle.

And so it was, as Aquilina ably relates, from Christianity's beginnings in Jerusalem, through its spread to Antioch, Ephesus, Rome, and Alexandria, to its establishment in the great cities of the later Roman Empire: Constantinople, Milan, Ravenna, and Carthage. Though Aquilina's story will be familiar to those with some knowledge of early Church history, there is much here even for experienced students.

For example, while we typically understand Christianity as a movement that shifted west in the centuries following the apostolic age, Edessa and Ejmiatsin (also known as Vagharshapat), remind us of the robust traditions of the East. The...

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...