A priest from Co Roscommon has been formally declared venerable by Pope Leo XIV, bringing him closer to sainthood.
Fr Edward Flanagan, who was born in Leabeg, on the Co Galway border, in 1886, was among several individuals to be advanced by the Pope towards sainthood on Monday.
“Venerable” is a title given to a deceased person who, having already been declared a “servant of God”, is recognised as having lived “heroic virtues”.
It means Flanagan, who died in 1948 in Berlin, Germany, has passed the second of four steps to canonisation. A miracle through his intercession is required before he is declared “blessed” and two miracles before he becomes a saint.
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Bishop of Achonry and of Elphin Kevin Doran said it was “wonderful to receive the good news from Rome”.
Flanagan emigrated to the US at a young age, where he became a priest of the Diocese of Omaha.
He subsequently founded Boys Town, which “flourished to become a place where young people could feel at home, and have all the advantages of a solid education and formation for life”, the bishop said.
The home was founded by the priest “in a time of crisis, when many young people were living rough on the streets and getting in trouble with the law”.
Doran added that since 2017, Flanagan’s “heroic virtue”, the measure of his holiness, has been “carefully considered” by the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, “leading up to today’s announcement”.
“His virtue shows clearly in many aspects of his life. One was the courage with which he pursued his vocation to the priesthood, in spite of difficulties with ill health.
“Another aspect of his holiness was his desire to help young people realise that they are loved by God,” Doran said.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Flanagan “stood up against the sectarianism of many in the establishment, and the racist ideology of the Ku Klux Klan, and insisted on welcome young people of all races and religions in Boys Town, on the basis of their need”, he said.
“During the second World War, when Japanese workers and their families in the United States were all interned as ‘hostile aliens’, Fr Flanagan arranged for many of them to be set free to come and live in Boys Town, where he provided them with a home and with employment.”
Doran said Flanagan’s life and virtue “have much to say to us today, in a wealthy country where so many children are forced to live with homelessness, and in a world in which we still find it so easy to define people as ‘hostile aliens’.”
