Fr Edward J Flanagan is the latest of several Irishmen and women taking steps closer to canonisation in recent years, after it was announced yesterday afternoon that Pope Leo XIV approved the advancement of the beatification cause for the ‘Boys Town’ founder.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because it was immortalised by the 1938 film Boys Town which is based on Fr Flanagan’s work. He was portrayed by American actor Spencer Tracy, who won that year’s Academy Award for Best Actor for his efforts in bringing Fr Flanagan to life on the big screen.
Fr Flanagan himself, however, was born in Leabeg, Co. Roscommon in July 1886, emigrating just under 20 years later to the US, where he was ordained a priest in 1912. His subsequent ministry in Nebraska was characterised by his work with homeless men and especially with troubled, disadvantaged and impoverished boys. It was to serve the latter that he established Father Flanagan’s Boys Home, which later became ‘Boys Town’.
His approach was unique at the time, because he committed with his Boys Home to accept all boys who needed help, “regardless of their race, creed or cultural background”. This is all the more remarkable given that when he opened the home in 1917, racial segregation was still in force across the US. When his home came up against the segregation laws in the city of Nebraska, he bought a farm outside of the city limits, which became the village of Boys Town.
As a result, Fr Flanagan’s communities have since come to be recognised as some of the first to be fully desegregated in the United States.
How about that? An Irish man at the vanguard of the American civil rights movement, positioning himself there out of a selfless desire to help young men who’d fallen on hard times or strayed down the wrong road.
If an apparently outsized moral contribution like Fr Flanagan’s seems unusual though, it’s simply because in the Ireland of 2026, we’ve unfortunately rendered ourselves incapable of appreciating the saintly stock that has steadily been gaining greater levels of recognition in recent years as they’ve advanced along that road.
We’ve rendered ourselves incapable because of their proximity to – their adherence to – the Catholic Church, which has fallen out of favour here even as people across the world have recognised the charitable lives led by no small number of Irish Catholics across the globe.
In the past 15 years, four Irish people have been declared “venerable”, much as Fr Flanagan has just been. They include Honora ‘Nano’ Nagle (founded the Presentation Sisters, an instrumental order in Irish education); John Sullivan SJ (a Jesuit priest famous for his work with the poor); Mary Aikenhead (who founded the Sisters of Charity); and another priest born in Ireland who moved to the US in his teens, Fr Patrick Peyton (best known for his advocacy for the Rosary).
Additionally, two have been given the title ‘Servant of God’ (which happens when the cause for canonisation is initiated): World War I chaplain, Fr Willie Doyle SJ (killed at Langemarck while trying to rescue some fallen men) and Sr Clare Crockett (died in Ecuador during an earthquake).
Each of these people devoted their lives to worthy causes that non-Catholics can appreciate: education, charity and service in various forms. The least scrutable to modern, Irish minds perhaps is Fr Patrick Peyton, whose cause is more so linked to his efforts on behalf of a devotion that the Church understands to be a very good thing indeed.
Nevertheless, the point remains. Some of Ireland’s finest sons and daughters have quietly been gaining esteem for their faith and works in recent years, and with the brief exception of a news cycle on the heels of the announcement, they are a cohort that go completely unrecognised domestically. Aside from the diminishing number of practising Catholics, these names remain relatively unknown even as the effects of their works remain among us.
This is a great shame, or if you’re feeling more pugnacious, a great injustice. With complaints on both sides of the political aisle, albeit for different reasons, about the state of the country, I can think of few worthier countermeasures than elevating those whose stories are relentlessly good, and obviously so.
But as long as the war on the Church continues, that broad recognition will be slow in coming.