Edward Flanagan emigrated from Roscommon in 1904 and was ordained at Innsbruck in 1912. Working with homeless men in Omaha, he concluded that he was meeting them thirty years too late, and in 1917 he borrowed ninety dollars and rented a house for five boys — two of them sent to him by a judge. He took any boy: Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Black, white, guilty, innocent. In 1921 he moved the whole enterprise to a farm ten miles west of the city, and it became a village with its own school, its own post office and, eventually, its own elected boy mayor.
His sentence — <em>there is no such thing as a bad boy</em> — was not sentiment but a working principle he defended against courts, newspapers and reform schools. Spencer Tracy played him in 1938 and won an Academy Award for it, and gave the statuette to Boys Town.
In 1947 General MacArthur asked him to go to Japan and Korea to advise on the children the war had left, and in 1948 he went to Austria and Germany to do the same. He was blunt about what he found and blunter about the institutions he was shown. He died of a heart attack in Berlin on 15 May 1948, on that work, and was brought home to Boys Town. His cause was opened in 2012 and Pope Leo XIV declared him Venerable on 23 March 2026, which makes him one of the most recent names in this catalogue.