Boys Town is based on the life of Father Edward Flanagan, who started the title home for young boys.  The movie begins in a prison. Dan Farrow, a man who is about to be executed, wants to confess.  The warden is pleased.  Farrow was convicted on circumstantial evidence, and everyone will be relieved to know that he was definitely guilty.  Farrow doesn’t care about that.  He’s hoping to avoid going to Hell, saying, “I’m doing it because I’m scared. It may help the big rap when I go through that last door.”

Farrow asks for a drink, and the warden obliges by pulling out a flask.  Instead of a last meal, I guess he gets a last shot of whiskey.  But just as he is about to swig it down, a priest walks up, one Father Flanagan (Spencer Tracy), who shakes his head no, causing Farrow to forgo the drink.

Apparently, Farrow had asked for Flanagan, saying, “He knew me when.”  They talk briefly about what happens after you die, with Flanagan emphasizing the importance of being sorry for one’s mistakes.  It is worth noting that Flanagan used the word “mistakes” rather than “sins.”  Unlike the word “sin,” the word “mistake” carries no connotation of evil, just an error of judgment.

Then four other men enter the cell: the warden, the judge, a reporter, and the executioner.  The reporter wisecracks, saying to Farrow, “If you’d stuck to your guns, I’d have kept you alive for years.”

“I wouldn’t try to be funny if I were you,” the warden says to him. “This man wants to admit his debt to the State.”

At this point, Farrow erupts, angry at the way the State has let him down ever since he was just a kid, when he was orphaned and homeless, forced to gradually enter a life of crime to stay alive, eventually forming a gang with other men just like him.  When one of his gang informed on the rest of them, Farrow says he killed him, the crime for which he must now pay.  But, he goes on to say, if he had had just one friend when he was twelve years old, none of this would have happened.  These words haunt Flanagan after he leaves the prison and goes home.

As he walks down the street, we see dozens of young boys, many of them homeless orphans, fighting amongst themselves and damaging property, including the smashed window of a pawnbroker, Dave Morris (Henry Hull). Dave blames Flanagan for attracting these young hoodlums with his homeless shelter, Father Flanagan’s Refuge, which is next door.  Upon entering the shelter, Flanagan tells the men that live there that he won’t be running the place anymore because he realizes it’s too late to help them.  He means this in the spiritual sense, for he has been providing them with something to eat and a place to sleep.

Some of the boys that were in street causing trouble are arrested, but Flanagan is able to get the court to be lenient.  In return, he makes the following promise:  “I’ll assume full responsibility for these boys if you’ll place them in my charge. I’ll give them a home, I’ll see to their schooling, and I’ll guarantee their good conduct.”

He goes to the bishop to get permission for what he wants to do, but the bishop is skeptical, offering Flanagan a parish instead, telling him he is just dreaming.  “But I’m not dreaming,” Flanagan says. “There’s one thing I know, I really know. And that is, that there’s no such thing in the world as a bad boy.  I’m sure of that.”

The bishop gives him permission to start a home for boys, but provides no financial assistance.  For that, Flanagan must repeatedly turn to Dave.  This makes it clear that Boys Town is not exclusively a Christian thing.

Boys Town grows from five to five hundred boys.  At this point, Mickey Rooney, as Whitey Marsh, enters the picture.  He is the younger brother of Joe Marsh, a prison inmate who wants Flanagan to reform Whitey.  His reasoning is a bit strange.  It’s not that Joe regrets his life and does not want Whitey to end up like him.  Instead, he says that Whitey just doesn’t have what it takes to be like him.

At the same time, Whitey is clearly supposed to be the ultimate test of Flanagan’s belief that there is no such thing as a bad boy.  Unlike the other boys, who seem to be a bunch of goody two-shoes, Whitey comes across as a hoodlum wannabe.  The idea is that if Flanagan can reform Whitey, then that proves he is right.  But if Whitey does not “have what it takes” to be like Joe, then Whitey really isn’t much of a test case after all.  In fact, the only “bad” things we know about him is that he likes to play poker and shoot pool.

There is much silliness in this movie, and there is much melodrama.  Joe escapes from prison and teams up with his gang. They rob a bank, killing the night watchman.  By sheer coincidence, Whitey, who has left Boys Town, just happens to run into that gang, one of whom shoots him.  He ends up in the hospital, with the police thinking he was part of the robbery.

Pressure is put on Whitey to tell who it was that robbed the bank, recalling the situation at the beginning of the movie, where Farrow confesses to killing the guy that informed on the rest of the gang.  For some reason, the logic of which escapes me, if Whitey does not squeal on his brother Joe, then Boys Town will be shut down.  I guess the idea is that if Whitey was part of the robbery, then there is such a thing as a bad boy, which undermines the rationale for the existence of Boys Town.

In the end, Joe exonerates Whitey, even urging him to tell what happened.  Then Joe and his gang are physically overpowered by Flanagan and the boys from Boys Town.  Whitey ends up back at Boys Town, crying in the arms of Father Flanagan, who says, “There is no bad boy.”

That is not what most of us would call a realistic view of human nature, but we make allowances for the fact that Father Flanagan was a member of the clergy.  This is just the sort of thing one should expect from a priest who is totally absorbed in Christianity, who is full of faith, hope, and charity.  Or is it?  Actually, given the official position of the Catholic Church, one might have expected him to say there is no such thing as a good boy.

In 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was accused of impiety by the archbishop of Paris for saying that man is basically good.  In his book Émile, Rousseau averred that “all is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things, all degenerates in the hands of men.”  In The Social Contract, he begins with the words, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”  In an earlier work, Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality among Men, he argued that it is civilization that has corrupted man, for in a state of nature, he is noble and good.  Since we cannot go back to that primitive state, Rousseau concluded, we must change society in such a way that man’s essential goodness can flourish.

When we hear slogans such as “defund the police” and “abolish prisons,” we know who is heir to this philosophy.  Those who espouse such ideas may have never read Rousseau or even heard of him, but the basic idea is the same:  instead of spending money on the police and on prisons, we should spend that money on social services that will reshape society and eliminate its corrupting influence.

After Rousseau’s books were condemned in Paris, he fled to Protestant Switzerland, but the Calvinists were hardly less hostile to his writings, the burning of his books being ordered by the executive council of Geneva.  Rousseau’s works offended Catholic and Protestant alike, for he had contradicted the doctrine of original sin, which holds that man is basically evil.  This doctrine is essential to Christianity, for it explains why the Son of God had to suffer and die on the cross to pay for the sins of mankind.  If man is essentially good, as Rousseau claims, then the crucifixion was unnecessary.

Father Flanagan made a distinction between men and boys.  For a man who is already steeped in sin, it may be too late for him, but with boys it is different.  After all, in Mark 10:13-15, when the disciples of Jesus tried to prevent children from approaching him, he said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.  Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.”

This would seem to be at odds with the doctrine of original sin, something St. Augustine addressed in Book I of his Confessions [Penguin Books Ltd, translated by R.S. Pine-Coffin, 1961].  In his prayer to God regarding the sins of man in general and his own sins in particular, he says, “Who can recall to me the sins I committed as a baby?  For in your sight no man is free from sin, not even a child who has lived only one day on earth.”

He notes that a baby will throw a tantrum if he does not get his own way, doing his best to strike and hurt others, including his parents, when they do not give in to him.  “If babies are innocent,” he notes, “it is not for lack of will to do harm, but for lack of strength.”  It is, indeed, unnerving to consider that if babies had the size and strength of adults, they would be monsters.

The part of his life he spent as a baby, Augustine goes on to say, “is no different from the time I spent in my mother’s womb.  But if I was born in sin and guilt was with me already when my mother conceived me, where, I ask you Lord, where or when was I, your servant, ever innocent?”

Moving on to his life as a boy, he admits that he often quarreled, lied, cheated, and stole.  Although the stakes were small, his sins as a boy were motivated by the same passions as the sins of adults.

These points having been made, he addresses what Jesus said regarding children:  “It was, then, simply because they are small that you used children to symbolize humility when, as our King, you commended it by saying that the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”

In other words, the little brats are no better than the rest of us.

Even just taking a neutral position, saying that man is not essentially either good or evil, is too much for the Catholic Church.  Pelagius, a contemporary of Augustine, denied the existence of original sin, saying that man has free will and can choose to be good, all on his own and without any help from God.  This is known as the Pelagian heresy.

Well, times have changed.  Father Flanagan, in saying that there is no such thing as a bad boy, sounds more like Rousseau or Pelagius than Augustine.  But instead of being charged with impiety or heresy, Flanagan was beatified as a Servant of God, and Pope Leo XIV granted him the title of Venerable.