VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Pope Leo XIV advanced the sainthood cause of Father Edward Flanagan, the Irish-born founder of a pioneering home for at-risk boys in the United States, recognizing that he lived the Christian virtues heroically.

The Vatican announced March 23 that the pope authorized the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints to promulgate the decree, a key step on the path to sainthood.

Born in 1886 in Ballymoe, Ireland, Father Flanagan immigrated to the United States, first moving to New York. He contracted double pneumonia during his first year of seminary and due to "weak lungs," doctors told him he would have to leave for at least a year, according to the Father Flanagan League Society of Devotion website. 

He moved to Omaha to live with his brother, who was also a priest and his sister, who was his housekeeper. He was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Omaha. Initially working with men who were experiencing homelessness, Father Flanagan became convinced that the roots of homelessness often began in childhood and could be addressed early in life.

“There are no bad boys,” he said. “There is only bad environment, bad training, bad example, bad thinking.”

In 1917, he founded Boys Town near Omaha, Nebraska, creating a community for orphaned and at-risk boys that broke with the traditional model of reform schools and orphanages. The village included its own student-run government and civic structures, along with nationally recognized music and sports programs.

Father Flanagan was also known for his forward-looking commitment to racial and religious inclusion. He welcomed Jewish and Black youths at a time of widespread segregation, drawing threats from the Ku Klux Klan, and insisted that boys of different faiths be free to pray according to their traditions.

During World War II, he opposed the internment of Japanese Americans and provided housing for nearly 200 displaced Japanese-Americans at Boys Town. 

Father Flanagan died in 1948 in Berlin. Today, Boys Town now welcomes girls, and it has expanded across the states, including in Florida, Iowa and New York.

His work gained national attention in the 1938 film “Boys Town,” with Spencer Tracy winning an Academy Award for his portrayal of the priest.

In the same Vatican announcement, Pope Leo XIV also recognized the heroic virtues of Father Henri Caffarel, founder of the Équipes Notre-Dame movement; Sister Barbara Stanislava Samulowska, a member of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul; Spanish Sister Maria of Bethlehem of the Heart of Jesus Romero Algarín, a member of the Congregation of the Handmaids of the Divine Heart; and Giuseppe Castagnetti, a 20th century Italian layman and father.

The pope also approved a decree recognizing "the offering of life" of Cardinal Ludovico Altieri, a 19th-century bishop of Albano, Italy. The "offering of life" (oblatio vitae) category indicates a candidate who heroically offered his life out of loving service to others. He died in 1867 after coming to the aid of his parishioners, administering the sacraments and running emergency care during a severe cholera epidemic in Albano. 

The Catholic Church recognizes several paths in sainthood causes. Most commonly, a candidate is declared “venerable” after the recognition that a Servant of God heroically lived a life of Christian virtues. A miracle attributed to the candidate's intercession is normally required for beatification, with a second miracle needed for canonization. 

Martyrs, those killed out of hatred for the faith, may be beatified without a miracle.

The third, less common way, is called an equivalent or equipollent canonization: when there is evidence of strong devotion among the faithful to a holy man or woman, the pope can waive a lengthy formal canonical investigation and can authorize their veneration as saints.

In 2017, Pope Francis introduced a new, fourth pathway to sainthood, known as the “offering of life,” recognizing those who freely gave their lives for others; it also requires a miracle for beatification.

Bishop and defender of the rights of the native Indians in Peru, Born in Mayorga, Spain, he studied law and became a lawyer and then professor at Salamanca, receiving appointment-despite being a layman-as chief judge of the court of Inquisition at Granada under King Philip II of Spain. The king subsequently appointed him in 1580 to the post of archbishop of Lima, Peru. After receiving ordination and then consecration, he arrived in Peru in 1581 and soon demonstrated a deep zeal to reform the ...

A letter which St. Jerome wrote to St. Marcella provides the only information we have about St. Lea, a devout fourth century widow. Upon the death of her husband, she retired to a Roman monastery and ultimately became its Superior. Since his correspondence was acquainted with the details of St. Lea's life, St. Jerome omitted these in his letter. He concentrated instead on the fate of St. Lea in comparison with that of a consul who had recently died. "Who will praise the blessed Lea as she ...

Legend has him an Irishman noted for his military feats who was convinced by his sister St. Fanchea to renounce his warring activities and marry. When he found his fiancee dead, he decided to become a monk and went on pilgrimage to Rome, where he was ordained. He returned to Ireland, built churches at Drogheda, and then secured from his brother-in-law King Oengus of Munster the island of Aran, where he built the monastery of Killeaney, from which ten other foundations on the island developed. ...

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Once a young teenager wearing a cap and gown for his eighth-grade graduation photo in Chicago, today the famous former-student posed for a reunion picture wearing his papal zucchetto and cassock at the Vatican.

Pope Leo XIV, who graduated from the lower school of St. Mary of the Assumption on the city's South Side in 1969, greeted and reminisced with 10 of his 82 former classmates after the general audience in St. Peter's Square March 18.

"Sorry! I'm nervous," laughed Sherry Stone (née Blue) after a small sign saying, "God bless you Pope Leo," slipped from her grasp when she reached out to shake the hand of her former classmate -- Robert F. Prevost.

The pope proudly held up their old graduation photo as they posed for another photo together, almost 60 years later.

"Here he is, our friend, the pope," Jerome Clemens told the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, pointing to the black-and-white image of the 13-year-old Prevost. Clemens then showed the back of the class photo with Prevost's old autograph and his new one that was signed, "Leo XIV." 

Among the small gifts they brought was the 2025 fall issue of "Air Chicago," a color magazine produced for passengers coming through Chicago's O'Hare and Midway airports, whose cover story was the election of a pope from Chicago.

The group came to Rome and the general audience to show their camaraderie and embrace once again their former classmate -- now the 266th successor of St. Peter, the newspaper reported.

John Riggio told the newspaper about the close-knit atmosphere at the school, saying it was more like a family.

In fact, the pope's mother, Mildred Agnes Prevost, worked there as a librarian and was also actively involved with the school and parish, Stone said. 

She told The Lansing Journal last May, right after her classmate's election by the College of Cardinals, that she had remembered him making a comment when they were young, "that he wanted to grow up to be pope."

"When he was in the conclave, I thought, 'Could it be him? Could Bob be the new pope? No, probably not,'" Stone had told the Journal. "When I saw that it was him, I was just amazed. I was crying tears of joy."

She had said he was kind, humble and well-liked by his classmates. "He was a super nice guy, but not nerdy."

Following his middle school graduation, Prevost went on to attend the Augustinians' St. Augustine Seminary High School near Saugatuck, Michigan, where he graduated in 1973, followed by enrolling in Villanova University, an Augustinian college located near Philadelphia, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics in 1977.
 

John Buralli, the seventh minister general of the Franciscans, was born at Parma in the year 1209, and he was already teaching logic there when at the age of twenty-five, he joined the Franciscans. He was sent to Paris to study and, after he had been ordained, to teach and preach in Bologna, Naples and Rome. He preached so well that crowds of people came to hear his sermons, even very important persons flocked to hear him. In the year 1247, John was chosen Minister General of the Order ...

Discover More About St. Joseph with Journey with the Saints Everything we know about the husband of Mary and the foster father of Jesus comes from Scripture and that has seemed too little for those who made up legends about him. We know he was a carpenter, a working man, for the skeptical Nazarenes ask about Jesus, "Is this not the carpenter's son?" (Matthew 13:55). He wasn't rich for when he took Jesus to the Temple to be circumcised and Mary to be purified he offered the sacrifice of two ...

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- All baptized Christians share in the Church's mission and, guided by the Holy Spirit, are fit for renewing and building up the Church, Pope Leo XIV said at his weekly general audience.

Every person who has been baptized is called to bear witness to Christ, and the whole Church, beyond its leaders, has a role in preserving the truth of the faith, the pope said March 18 in St. Peter's Square.

Continuing his series of reflections on the Second Vatican Council, the pope focused on the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church ("Lumen Gentium"), and the participation of the lay faithful in Jesus Christ's "priestly, prophetic and royal offices," that is, the offices of teaching, sanctifying and governing.

Everyone enters the Church as a layperson, he said. Through Baptism and Confirmation, the faithful are "more perfectly bound to the Church" and are endowed "with special strength" by the Holy Spirit, so that they are "more strictly obliged to spread and defend the faith, both by word and by deed, as true witnesses of Christ," he said, quoting the document.

"This consecration is at the root of the common mission that unites the ordained ministries and the lay faithful," Pope Leo said. In fact, everyone is called to bear witness to the truth of the faith. 

The Doctrinal Commission of the Council specified that the sense of faith "belongs to individual believers not in their own right, but as members of the People of God as a whole," the pope said.

The function of the Holy Spirit is to lead Christians to the truth, and because the entire body of the faithful is anointed by "the holy one," he said, "the Church, therefore, as the communion of the faithful -- which naturally includes the pastors -- cannot err in matters of faith."

"From this unity, which the Magisterium of the Church safeguards, it follows that every baptized person is an active agent of evangelization, called to bear consistent witness to Christ in accordance with the prophetic gift which the Lord bestows upon His whole Church," he said. 

The Holy Spirit, who comes from the Risen Christ, he said, distributes"special graces" among all the faithful, who are then able to contribute to the renewal and building of the Church. 

"Dear friends, let us rekindle in ourselves the awareness of and gratitude for having received the gift of being part of God’s people; and also the responsibility that this entails," he said.

"Make your fold with the sheep; flee from the wolves: depart not from the Church," Cyril admonished catechumens surrounded by heresy. These were prophetic words for Cyril was to be hounded by enemies and heretics for most of his life, and although they could exile him from his diocese he never left his beloved Church. Cyril's life began a few years before Arianism (the heresy that Jesus was not divine or one in being with the Father) and he lived to see its suppression and ...

Discover More About St. Patrick with Journey with the Saints St. Patrick of Ireland is one of the world's most popular saints. He was born in Roman Britain and when he was fourteen or so, he was captured by Irish pirates during a raiding party and taken to Ireland as a slave to herd and tend sheep. At the time, Ireland was a land of Druids and pagans but Patrick turned to God and wrote his memoir, The Confession. In The Confession, he wrote: "The love of God and his fear grew in me more and ...