A loving Catholic family at home in Ireland provided the foundations and values that led Venerable Father Edward Flanagan to establish Boys Town in Omaha, Nebraska, according to experts on his life in Ireland.
Flanagan, who was born and raised in the small village of Ballymoe, Ireland, before emigrating to the United States, was declared venerable on March 23 by Pope Leo XIV.
Fidelma and Alan Croghan of the Father Flanagan Group in Ballymoe provided insight into the Irish priest’s formative years to EWTN News. “He was the fourth-youngest of 11 children. His father was a herdsman looking after an absentee landlord’s livestock on the estate. They lived in a cottage here at Leabeg,” Fidelma said.
“From birth Father Flanagan’s life was bathed in the warm embrace of a loving family. On the night he was born, they didn’t think that he would survive because he was quite ill. He was a very sickly person all of his life in terms of bad lung health. The story goes that his grandparents also lived in the house with them. So the grandfather took the tiny newborn baby and put the baby skin to skin, against his own heart for the night, and Eddie survived.”
Fidelma shared that from the moment of his birth, Flanagan “knew love and the loving bond of a family; he had a very happy upbringing. Their home was full of music and happiness, neighbors came in and they played music and danced on the stone flagstones of the kitchen floor before a big open fire.”
She added: “He worked with his dad as a shepherd boy tending to the sheep. He was into prayer and reading from a young age, and he wrote about going out on the land with his rosary beads and reading Dickens.”
Following primary education at the nearby Drumatemple National School, Flanagan attended the Diocesan College of the Immaculate Conception, Summerhill College, Sligo, to complete his secondary education and prepare for life as a priest.
Alan Croghan said he has no doubt that the future priest’s upbringing and the family values he espoused throughout his life were formed by his origins and his upbringing in Ireland.
“Our purpose in Ireland here is to educate people and tell them about this man, going on to America to do what he did in Boys Town. He took what he learned here in Ballymoe, how a family should be run,” he said.
Bishop Kevin Doran of Achonry and of Elphin told EWTN News: “Father Flanagan’s life and virtue have much to say to us today, in a wealthy country where so many children are forced to live with homelessness, and in a world in which we still find it so easy to define people as ‘hostile aliens.’”
Boys Town families and descendants often visit Ballymoe and the Father Flanagan Visitor Centre to see the famous priest’s hometown. Fidelma Croghan said: “We had a woman come two or three years ago, and she knelt on the floor of the house, and she cried, and cried, and cried, and said, ‘Only Father Flanagan saved my father; I wouldn’t be here.’ Another visitor told me: ‘I would have been dead as a young man, or would have spent my life in jail, only for Boys Town.’”
If Flanagan’s experiences growing up in Ireland shaped his compassionate approach to the social issues he encountered in Nebraska, his experiences there dealing with troubled boys and young men subsequently influenced his reactions during a return trip to Ireland in 1946, when he visited the country’s reform schools.
He was profoundly troubled at the desperately poor conditions and treatment they encountered. Speaking about the schools in Cork, he told the audience: “You are the people who permit your children and the children of your communities to go into these institutions of punishment. You can do something about it.” He described his country’s penal institutions as “a disgrace to the nation.”
Flanagan had received letters from Ireland drawing attention to the brutal regimes in these schools and wanted to see for himself how bad conditions really were.
In response to his prophetic warnings, the Irish government minister for justice at the time, Gerald Boland, told the Dáil (Irish legislative chamber) “that he was ‘not disposed to take any notice of what Monsignor Flanagan said while he was in this country, because his statements were so exaggerated that I did not think people would attach any importance to them.’”
The schools Flanagan visited included Artane and Letterfrack, institutions that became notorious after the truth of the abuses inflicted on students there eventually emerged.
