That was in 1946 after he was asked by President Truman to take a tour of Europe and investigate their reform schools. Although his condemnation of the physical abuses that permeated the system in his own country could not have been more forceful, his words were ignored. How sad and tragic in the wake of the revelations now coming out from this horrible chapter in Irish Church history. It must have been a heavy cross for this big-hearted priest who died only two years later at the age of sixty. Spencer Tracey and a young Mickey Rooney immortalized Boys Town and its founder in the classic film of the same name. Father Flanagan is most often quoted for the line: “There’s no such thing as a bad boy.” Nice theory, but no one knew better than he, that such was not the fact. The priest did, after all, hear the confessions of his boys, as did his exemplar Saint John Bosco, who died two years after Flanagan was born. What the good priest meant, of course, is that no boy, no matter how bad, was reformable. Just as an aside, I had the privilege of meeting Father Flanagan’s sister, in the year 2001 I think it was. She must have been nearly one-hundred-years-old, but was perfectly alert and conversant. She was a member of my aunt’s religious community, the Sisters of Charity, in Convent Station, NJ.
Catholic Culture reports: In a 1946 trip to his native Ireland, Father Edward Flanagan (1886-1948), founder of Boys Town, toured reform schools now under fire for their endemic abuse and called them a “scandal, un-Christlike, and wrong.” Read more here.
