Short Biography: Father Edward Flanagan Of Boys Town

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Father Edward Flanagan of Boys Town. Father Edward Flanagan who saw Christ’s face in the faces of the poor was constantly told that aiding them merely aided an increase in the pauper population. A belief he repeated throughout his life that “there are no bad boys, only bad environment, bad training, bad example, and bad thinking” affronted every traditionalist who viewed corporal punishment as a time tried corrective to character transform incorrigible offenders. Father Flanagan was alone in the Christian world when he publicly castigated corporal punishment as a barbaric practice in all its forms. Against a tidal wave of opposition and without any financial help from the Church or State he founded an industrial school for boys near Omaha…show more content…
His achievements as a pioneer in child welfare had earned him so many international plaudits that his work was dramatized in the 1938 Hollywood film “Boys Town” that starred Spencer Tracey as Father…show more content…
Having attended the local national school he later shared a classroom with the Irish tenor John McCormack in Summerhill College in Sligo. To the USA he sailed in 1904 to study for the priesthood in Emmitsburg in Maryland, but his studies and the unceasing voluntary welfare work that he undertook had so exhausted him that illness made him leave the seminary in 1907. For these same reasons he had to leave Rome’s Gregorian University in 1908. He entered the Jesuit seminary in Innsbruck in Austria in 1909, was ordained there in 1912, and was posted to a parish in Omaha City in the State of Nebraska. After the newly laid railways began operating in Nebraska the daily freighting of thousands of cattle to Omaha’s stockyards had transformed that frontier town into a city within five decades. When Father Flanagan arrived in Omaha eight succeeding annual droughts in Mid West America had robbed many thousands of cattle men, cow boys, and stockyard workers of their employment. As Father Flanagan spent most of his time aiding the destitute in a city where hundreds of homeless young men were dying each winter from exposure and hunger he was instructed by the Bishop of Omaha to pay more attention to his parish duties than to waste time on worthless people. On the day that he opened a large and empty hotel that he rented to shelter homeless men Father Flanagan apologized to them that they had but dry straw to bed them down

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