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Filmmakers, commentators discuss Father Flanagan and his impact
October 4, 2024
“Heart of a Servant: The Father Flanagan Story” will hit theaters for a one-night showing on Oct. 8.
In making the feature-length documentary, filmmakers dove into archives and traveled around the world to learn about the Archdiocese of Omaha priest who founded Boys Town in 1917. In 2012 – just 64 years after his death – Father Flanagan was declared “Servant of God,” the first step in the Church’s canonization process.
Local experts, including archdiocese officials promoting Father Flanagan’s sainthood cause, helped make the movie and are featured as commentators.
Who is Father Flanagan and why is he relevant today?
Those involved in the movie shared their thoughts on the holy priest and his enduring influence. They were interviewed Sept. 13, when the film premiered at Boys Town.
Local showtimes and tickets for Oct. 8 are available here.
Jonathan Roumie, narrator and an executive producer
Roumie, who gained popularity among Catholics for portraying Jesus in the television series “The Chosen,” has been a big draw for the Father Flanagan film.
Being part of the “Heart of a Servant” movie was “a little bit of a change of pace for me,” the actor said. Before his involvement with the film, he had been only remotely aware of Father Flanagan.
“I mean, I had heard of the Spencer Tracy film (“Boys Town,” 1938),” he said. “I may have seen it in college, but I didn’t really know much about Father Flanagan.
“So when I got approached to narrate the film, I said, well, let me see what this film is about and who this man is.” And he fell in love.
“Father Flanagan drew me,” he said in a panel discussion after the premiere. “I feel like he kind of just tapped me on the shoulder the minute I saw the work that these guys did. Putting the film together, it was a no-brainer. It was an honor to get to be a part of this story. ”
“The guy was a warrior for Jesus, defending the most vulnerable of society,” Roumie said during the panel discussion. “God used him in a way where he reached the ears of people at the highest positions of power all over the world.”
“Being an Irishman myself – a part-Irishman, I should say – I just connected with him, and his heart for serving children … and the most vulnerable in society,” Roumie said in his Catholic Voice interview. “That really spoke to me.”
He said he loved Father Flanagan’s selflessness, “the fact that he put his own personal well-being second to the children’s well-being. He lived in these sort of substandard conditions, and his priority was making sure these kids had clean, dry beds — warm beds – even if maybe he didn’t.
“So it was truly inspiring and encouraging to see someone like him really walking the walk.”
“I think his story is as timely now as it was then,” Roumie said. “Children will always need protection and love and compassion and guidance in their most formative years. And that hasn’t changed.”
“His mission has continued, just like he said it would, long after he had come and gone and been called back home to the Lord.”
“I wish he’d lived longer,” he said. “But he lived as long as the Lord needed him to establish his mission. … And it’s still going, it’s still continuing. So that’s a testament to the Holy Spirit and the love of Jesus that he implanted in these children’s hearts and in the community, and just an example of what one person can do with the love of Christ in their heart for the most needy in society.”
Roumie’s trip to Omaha for the premiere was his first visit to Nebraska.
While at Boys Town, he prayed at Father Flanagan’s tomb and toured the campus. He said he liked how Father Flanagan “leveraged media and culture to help his mission.
“I felt connected to him being somebody who works in media trying to impact the culture. So I felt like, oh, this is a new ally for me now.”
Steve Wolf, vice postulator for Father Flanagan’s sainthood cause, a Boys Town alumnus and a commentator in the documentary
The movie “is absolutely one of the most impactful tools” for furthering devotion to Father Flanagan and helping his sainthood cause move forward,” Wolf said.
“This whole effort (of promoting Father Flanagan’s sainthood cause) is built on prayer and cooperating with the Holy Spirit, and we feel this film is part of that. There are 2,000 open causes for canonization at the Vatican right now, and we certainly want to inspire people to choose Servant of God Flanagan as an intercessor with their prayers. And those prayers will lead to miracles – and his canonization.”
“This cause really began as a groundswell of devotion” in the community, he said, especially among Boys Town alumni and the former youths of his mission.
But “what was interesting for me as an alumnus in that effort is just how many people who didn’t even have a direct connection to the alumni family or the Boys Town mission were devoted to Father Flanagan.”
For Wolf, Father Flanagan’s example resounds personally.
“Father didn’t actually set out to start Boys Town,” he said. “He found those first five boys who needed his help, and then he found another, and he found another. I’m the father of five children, and I just know that in my own experience … when you love the first one so much, could you have even more love?”
He said that he and his wife found that their “hearts just got bigger” with each child. He suspects a similar thing happened to Father Flanagan.
“I can only imagine how big that man’s heart is, because there was not a child who needed him, that he wasn’t there to love and to pick up.
“I think you get that love from being connected with your Lord and Savior. So that’s something that I really learned, that you’ve got to surrender to that love, and you’re going to change the world when you do that.”
Father Ryan Lewis, the archbishop’s delegate for the canonization cause and a commentator in the documentary
“This film, I think, is going to introduce, or re-introduce, many more folks to Father Flanagan and his life and his mission,” said Father Lewis, who recently became pastor at St. Robert Bellarmine Parish in Omaha.
“That can only help (the sainthood cause) as more people see the movie, are inspired by him, pray to him and ask his intercession. We need miracles, a couple miracles for him to move on in the process of canonization. I think this film can be very instrumental in that.”
Father Flanagan is already known worldwide and has had many books written about him. But the documentary, which “is so incredibly well done,” will help reach even more people, Father Lewis said, including younger generations.
He said he remembers finding a biography of Father Flanagan, written in Italian, in a bookstore in Rome in the 1990s.
“I was a little bit surprised,” he said, “but then again, while he was based here in Omaha, he was from Ireland and studied in Europe and traveled then on behalf of President (Harry) Truman to Europe and Asia.”
Boys Town and its methods of helping youths are also known worldwide. “It’s not just an Omaha reality,” Father Lewis said. “It has spread the way he spread himself over his not-super-long life. He got a lot accomplished.”
Father Flanagan’s life still resonates today in our not-so-different times, he said.
“We sometimes think of the family being under such a terrible crisis,” that nowadays “everything’s really bad with the family, and therefore with children and their welfare,” Father Lewis said.
“The Flanagan story reminds us that there were problems back then, or there would’ve been no need for a Boys Town.”
“What we should do is be like Flanagan and say, ‘Are there problems in society? Are there problems with the family? Yes, but let’s do something about it. Let’s be a positive agent for change and for action.’
“Flanagan never wrung his hands. I think that’s an action he just never ever did. He did something where he saw a need … and worked with folks of other religions at a time when that was really unheard of. He was really ahead of his time in that regard.
“So there’s an ecumenical, interfaith aspect of this, too, that when it comes to something like our kids, we should all be able to come together – regardless of religion or anything that would otherwise separate us. When it comes to kids, we should all be unified in our desire to do our best for them.”
Father Flanagan has impacted Father Lewis personally, especially as an archdiocesan priest.
“Father Flanagan is a huge inspiration to me,” he said, “someone that I’ve always looked up to. One of the real gifts of being involved with the cause, and more recently being involved with this film, is to just deepen even more my knowledge of him, which has caused my respect to increase, which has caused my certainty of his holiness of life.”
Father Lewis said he hopes the Vatican will agree with him and eventually canonize Father Flanagan, though he knows God is in charge of that process and its timing.
“But my life has been changed forever by Father Flanagan, regardless,” he said.
Deacon Omar Gutiérrez, notary for the canonization cause and a commentator in the documentary
Father Flanagan’s life demonstrates what can happen when a person gives his or her life over to Christ,” Deacon Gutiérrez said. “What can be done if we simply trust in Him.”
“Pray,” he said, “for great things are going to happen through prayer.”
In his own life, as a father of five, he’s taken to heart Father Flanagan’s witness for fathers. Father Flanagan famously said, “There’s no such thing as a bad boy,” and through his example he has taught parents how to love children even when they’re naughty.
His life has been “an inspiration for me,” Deacon Gutiérrez said, and has “hopefully made me a better father.”
Rob Kaczmark, co-director and executive producer
“I’d like to say that we chose him,” Kaczmark said of Father Flanagan, but the holy priest seemed to have chosen Kaczmark and others at Spirit Juice Studios, a Catholic movie production company.
In 2017 Steve Wolf and the Father Flanagan League presented the idea for the movie to the studio, which has made several documentaries on saints, people on the road to sainthood and other inspirational people.
Kaczmark said the filmmakers have been privileged to share Father Flanagan’s story and sought to do so “in a beautiful, compelling way.”
“Because if you can draw people in by beauty, you can move their hearts, and if you move their hearts, you can move them closer to Christ,” the executive producer said in a panel discussion after the premiere at Boys Town. “Father Flanagan did that individually to all the boys he met, and we try to do that collectively in a film to draw people closer to Father Flanagan.”
As someone involved in youth ministry both as a student and as a leader, Kaczmark said he knows that reaching people when they are young is important. Part of the genius of Father Flanagan, he said, was forming children at a young age, planting “seeds of faith that will go on to live for their entire lives.”
“We’ve interviewed the people who’ve attended Boys Town, and the way they speak about it, there’s just something special that the seeds of faith were planted here,” he said.
Father Flanagan’s approach was simple: “Look at the person in front of you,” Kaczmark said, “because that’s what Father Flanagan did. He served the people in front of him,” and for many people, “that’s your own family.”
Be Christ to those people, he said.
Victoria McEachern, producer
By researching Father Flanagan, McEachern said, she learned how much he sacrificed during his lifetime.
He became famous for a Hollywood movie that won an Oscar, “and all of that is very exciting,” McEachern said, but Father Flanagan was “also a priest who loved the Lord and just wanted to serve him.”
Even with all the exciting moments in Father Flanagan’s life, including advising a U.S. president, his priestly service is “what it all came back to.”
Father Flanagan’s courage is needed today, McEachern said. He was relentless, always willing to “stand up and speak out for what he thought was right for the people who needed his help and to not really give a single care in the world for what was going to happen to him for doing that.”
That type of courage “absolutely stands the test of time and I think is very relevant for today.”
“I don’t think he was ever intimidated, ever. I don’t think Father Flanagan could feel intimidation.”
Daniel Gebert, co-director and writer
Gebert and his co-workers were privileged to view Father Flanagan’s life from a front-row seat, Gebert said, by examining the priest’s journals, seeing the actual negatives of photos that appeared in magazines and newspapers and interviewing experts and people impacted by Father Flanagan.
“And time and time again … his number one priority was always those individuals who were homeless … individuals who were struggling, after the war (World War II) and in every corner of the globe and every corner of the country,” the movie executive said.
“He was seeking out those that he thought he could help … in some way, give them a better opportunity, a better place to live, even just a roof over their head.
“That was the kind of servant lifestyle I think was the lifeblood of Father Flanagan and his work. And that made him such a phenomenal leader.”
Gloria Purvis, nationally known speaker, media host and commentator in the documentary
During Father Flanagan’s time, the United States was struggling with issues of race and human dignity. And the country is still struggling with those issues, Purvis said during the panel discussion after the premiere.
Father Flanagan brought in children of different races and backgrounds, and they lived like family. “This is what Christ wants for us,” she said.
Father Flanagan proved it can be done, “we just have to have the mind and heart to do it.”
The Boys Town founder must have been “a man of immensely deep prayer to be able to persevere in the kind of ministry he did without a whole bunch of money at the ready,” she said. At one point, the film shows, he ran out of food for the children in his care, so he called them all together to pray.
“God stepped in,” Purvis said, and food was provided.
“It’s something that we have to continually remember, that all things are under His dominion. All things. And when we need it, He will bring it.”
“I hope people remember that about Father Flanagan, and that witness and that story so that we never become despairing. … All things are possible with God, and Father Flanagan is an example of that truth.”