Churchgoing wasn’t really a thing in the household where I spent my pre-adolescence. Watching classic movies, on the other hand, was a common ritual. That’s why, thanks to Spencer Tracy’s Oscar winning performance from 1938, even a religious illiterate such as myself had some passing knowledge of Father Edward J. Flanagan and the Boys Town he founded. (Photo above is from the movie.)
Time passes, though, and 86-year-old movies about priests are rarely aired anymore. So, to help keep the good Father’s memory alive for newer generations, perhaps now is the right time for a documentary such as Heart of a Servant: The Father Flanagan Story.
Produced by Spirit Juice Studios, the well-known creators and distributors of online Catholic content, the film keeps to the tried-and-true documentary format of following their subject’s life through old photos and videos, as well as interviews with those who knew him. As a bonus, though, the movie also features Jesus himself as the narrator. Well, Jonathan Roumie anyway, who plays the Savior on the hit television show The Chosen.
Flanagan's childhood and ministry
To help understand his motivations later in life, the film takes some time to explore Flanagan’s childhood in an impoverished area of Ireland. Born the 8th of 11 children to a simple herdsman, Flanagan was sickly from an early age. The combination of little money and constant illness likely informed the future priest’s calling to help the orphaned street kids he encountered upon emigrating to America.
Fr. Flanagan’s youth ministry started with a single house for homeless boys in Omaha, Nebraska, that he founded with the aid of a Jewish benefactor. He was able to secure such funding because Flanagan took in all needy boys, regardless of race, religion, or nationality. While this sounds like no big deal these days, in 1917 Omaha such interracial lodging didn’t sit well with the local Ku Klux Klan or those responsible for enforcing the state’s Jim Crow laws.
Realizing the shelter was eventually going to be shut down, the priest did what anybody else would do in his place: He decided to build his own city. Okay, so almost nobody else would even conceive of doing such a thing, which is why we’re still talking about Fr. Flanagan today. In 1921, with backing from various sources, Flanagan broke ground on what would come to be known as Boys Town about 10 miles west of Omaha.
Starting off with only a few small buildings, most built with the help of the youth themselves, Boys Town would grow into a sprawling campus with its own schools, post office, dormitories, and more. With hundreds of boys between the ages of 10 and 16 in residence and being taught marketable skills, Boys Town became the nation’s first true interracial community.
Perfect for Hollywood
So successful was Fr. Flanagan’s experiment in child welfare that its reputation convinced Hollywood to come calling in 1938, which brings us full circle to the aforementioned Oscar winning production of Boys Town with Spencer Tracy as Flanagan and Mickey Rooney as the young hooligan with a mountain of chips on his shoulder he takes in. The movie is a tearjerker of a tale tailor-made for Tinseltown, and it did extremely well.
In a Hollywood production, that’s where the credits would roll, but Fr. Flanagan’s real-life story didn’t stop there. The documentary goes on to cover his efforts to get more than 200 families freed from America’s wartime internment camps, his trip back to Ireland where he butted heads with Parliament over the condition of that country’s childcare institutions, and his work for President Truman in setting up aid for suffering children in Japan following World War II. And he did it all while continuing to fight the illness he contracted during childhood.
Boys Town alone would likely have been enough to warrant someone being declared a saint, but with everything else he accomplished, it’s little wonder Fr. Flanagan was named a Servant of God in 2012 and his cause for sainthood is well underway. His is an inspirational story, and one worth visiting, both for those who aren’t familiar with Fr. Flanagan and for those who know of him only from the Spencer Tracy film.
Heart of a Servant: The Father Flanagan Story comes to theaters nationwide for one-day on Tuesday, October 8.
