The Christophers: Heart of a Servant

Tony Rossi

Director of Communications

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For more than 100 years, Boys Town has been a trusted charity, started by Father Edward Flanagan, whose selfless service and heroic virtue led to him recently being declared Venerable by the Vatican and putting him on the road to sainthood. Two men who played a major role in moving his cause forward are Tom Lynch and Steve Wolf.

Born in Ireland in 1886, Edward Flanagan hailed from a devout Catholic family. He faced medical challenges as a child and received loving care, which shaped his own personality. Because his father was a herdsman, Edward also learned to tend sheep, going after the lost ones who needed rescuing. During a “Christopher Closeup” interview, Boys Town historian Tom Lynch noted that Venerable Father Flanagan’s environment at home and abroad impacted his approach to others: “In the 1880s, Ireland was a colony of Britain. The Irish faith, the language, the history had for centuries been discouraged, if not outlawed in some instances. He saw what it was like to be different, even though he was in his home country…He immigrated to America when he was 18 years old…And here he was, in [New York City] with millions of other people of different races and religions, and he saw how they were treated…Many towns put up signs saying, ‘No Irish, no Catholics, welcome.’…But he always had the idea, ‘I want to treat everyone as an individual.’”

Venerable Father Flanagan moved to Omaha, Nebraska, where he started working with the poor and homeless. He soon found that preteen and teenage boys would come into shelters for adult men because they had nowhere else to go. These boys were either forced to live on the streets or sent to jail or reform school. Father Flanagan opened Boys Town in 1917 to provide a home for these young people, regardless of race, color or creed.

Steve Wolf, an executive producer of the Christopher Award-winning documentary “Heart of a Servant,” explained, “Many other people at that time were looking for the differences among us: ‘Oh, I can’t help this Black child, I can’t help this Jewish child.’ [There were] all these different reasons that people would come up with to divide humanity, as opposed to seeing everybody the way God does and the way Father Flanagan did, which is that every child is a child of God and they all deserve love and justice and to be treated with dignity and respect. I think that’s what was absolutely revolutionary, if not outright radical [about him].”

Tom Lynch noted that not everyone was thrilled with Father Flanagan’s welcoming approach: “In America at the time, there was a theory called eugenics. Eugenics was a horrific idea that said certain people were superior to others. It was used at the turn of the century against people that were immigrating from Eastern Europe and Hispanics, African Americans, Irish Catholics. They were considered inferior, and it wasn’t worth the time and effort to educate them or care for them. [Some people said] they were polluting American society. Father Flanagan said, ‘That is not correct.’…He was part of the Catholic Church that stood up against that theory because eventually it was used in Europe for the Holocaust. Father Flanagan saw the value in every child. He said, ‘You cannot throw away children…The way we treat our children is the way our society will be in the future.’”

More on Venerable Father Flanagan next time.

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For free copies of the Christopher News Note THE GREATEST AMONG YOU WILL BE YOUR SERVANT, write: The Christophers, 264 West 40th Street, Room 603, New York, NY 10018; or e-mail: mail@christophers.org