Msgr. Michael T. Flanagan: 60 years of uniting, lifting up the laity

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The twin sons of Tim and Kate Flanagan answered a call to the Priesthood.

John Patrick joined the Missionary Society of St. Patrick and served in mission fields around the world.

Michael landed in the heart of Missouri as part of an impressive contingent of “foreign-born Irish” (F.B.I.) priests to minister in the Jefferson City diocese.

Six decades after priestly ordination, Monsignor Michael T. Flanagan still delights in the newness of it all.

“Priesthood is like life itself,” he once stated. “You never know what’s coming next! It’s blessings, and it’s challenges and a lot of joy and happiness in serving God and his people.”

Now living in retirement in Columbia, Msgr. Flanagan still helps out at Our Lady of Lourdes Parish, where he served as pastor for 25 years and oversaw the construction of the current Our Lady of Lourdes Church.

He previously ministered as associate pastor at St. George Parish in Linn, Sacred Heart Parish in Columbia and Cathedral of St. Joseph Parish in Jefferson City; as a faculty member at the former St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Hannibal; and as pastor of St. Robert Bellarmine Parish in St. Robert, Mary Immaculate Parish in Kirksville and the Mission of St. Rose of Lima in Novinger, and Immaculate Conception Parish in Jefferson City.

Throughout that time, he became well-known for his pastoral instincts as well as his administrative acumen.

“It’s really the people who do it,” he once stated. “They have the gifts. They can do a lot. You have to motivate them and show them that they can do it.”

Sent forth

Empowering people to take care of each other and lead one another to Christ was a hallmark of Msgr. Flanagan’s pastoral ministry.

He learned a lot of it at home. He and seven siblings grew up on his parents’ farm in Ireland.

Young Michael admired priests and thought about joining their ranks.

A priest once told him, “It’s a good way to serve God and to serve other people and to save your soul by the saving of the souls of others.”

Msgr. Flanagan still agrees.

“There’s no better way to serve than to be there for God and his people, day in and day out, in their joys and their sorrows,” he said.

Throughout Msgr. Flanagan’s early years, Ireland was brimming with young men and women who were passionate about the missions and introducing people to Christ.

Like his brother, young Michael wanted to be a missionary priest.

He went to a high school for future missionaries and spent a year in the novitiate of the African Mission Priests in Ireland.

Realizing that that was not his calling, he followed some friends to St. John Seminary in Waterford, Ireland.

“I was at first planning to go to San Antonio, but by the time Bishop (Joseph) Marling (of Jefferson City) came to visit us in the seminary, I had made up my mind that I was going to Missouri,” Msgr. Flanagan recalled.

The future priest never actually visited the United States until after he was ordained.

“But all of my father’s family was living in Connecticut,” he said. “We had a liking for the people of the United States.”

He knew he would see less of his family, “but you always adjust ... and we did.”

Msgr. Flanagan has been able to return to his Irish roots almost every year, and to head back for family events and funerals.

“But after all of these years, my friends are here now — the ones I mourn with and rejoice with all year,” he said.

“We remember our times of sadness and times of joy,” he stated. “That’s life, and that’s how you bond with people: You share in their life and they share in yours.”

“Imitate what you celebrate”

On June 12, 1965, in the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Waterford, Archbishop Thomas Morris ordained Msgr. Flanagan to the Holy Priesthood.

He offered his first Mass the following morning in St. Attracta Church in Killaraught.

The first place he offered Mass in Missouri was Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Columbia — which was still in the middle of a cornfield.

Except during his short time in St. Robert and right up to his retirement, he lived in community with other priests.

He served in Kirksville and Novinger for 10 years, then as pastor of Immaculate Conception Parish in Jefferson City for eight.

He became pastor of Our Lady of Lourdes Parish on Nov. 26, 1990.

His time there coincided with tremendous growth in the parish. He oversaw the construction of a new, 800-seat church, along with additional classrooms for the school.

He was also instrumental in establishing Fr. Tolton Regional Catholic High School in Columbia.

Learning to flow

Msgr. Flanagan was in the seminary while the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) was taking place.

He did not experience the resulting tectonic shifts in Church governance and culture and in the Mass until he got to Missouri.

“It was a confusing time to be a priest,” he recalled. “Masses in the vernacular or Masses in Latin? When I came, some pastors were beginning to change. Some were not.

“It was a process, and the people were in that process,” he noted. “It was a confusing time for them, too.”

Priests had to learn how to quickly deal with change, “or you’d be lost,” he said. “You learned to listen and you learned to flow.”

After about 10 years, he said, most laypeople were used to praying the Mass in their own language and started answering their baptismal call to active participation in the life of the Church.

“And the Church came alive again in an exciting new way,” he stated.

Room to grow

Nearly half the priests of this diocese at one time served as associate pastors or transitional deacons under Msgr. Flanagan.

He went out of his way to be a mentor and friend to all who were assigned to minister with him.

Our Lady of Lourdes was on its way to becoming the largest parish in the diocese when Msgr. Flanagan was appointed pastor.

The parish hall that now bears his name was still serving as the church. Some people had to stand outside during Mass, even though an addition had been built a few years earlier.

The parish had a $400,000 debt.

“It looked a little bit impossible,” he recalled. “But I said, ‘Listen, this is a great parish. If you get it going, it will boom!’”

Parishioners “pulled up their socks,” paid down the debt and wound up planning and paying for an impressive new church with room for everyone.

Bishop Emeritus John R. Gaydos, who led the diocese from 1997-2018, dedicated the church in 1999.

The following year, Pope St. John Paul II appointed Msgr. Flanagan a prelate of honor, with the title reverend monsignor.

Watch and pray

Msgr. Flanagan learned early in his Priesthood never to neglect prayer, no matter how busy he got.

“If you don’t pray, you lose your way, you lose touch with God,” he said. “You can’t do that and stay in the Priesthood. You just can’t.

“The only one who keeps us straight is the Good Lord,” he added. “We need to take our time to be with Him. That’s the most important thing of all.”

The priest successfully battled cancer late in his tenure at Our Lady of Lourdes.

He’s convinced that people’s prayers helped him pass unscathed through the shadow of death.

“I particularly appreciated the prayers of the schoolchildren,” he stated at that time. “The prayer of innocence, I call it. It’s most effective.”

He retired as pastor in 2015.

“I am very proud of you as a parish,” he wrote to the people at that time. “I know that I have grown spiritually, and I know many of you have, too.”

He continued helping out as senior priest in service at Our Lady of Lourdes until 2023, when another major health crisis nearly claimed his life.

A stubborn infection and an intestinal ulcer landed him in the hospital, where he wound up having a stroke and experiencing kidney failure.

“The bishop came and gave me all the absolutions,” Msgr. Flanagan noted.

Father Christopher Cordes, his successor as pastor, sent out an urgent prayer request to fellow priests and parishioners.

The children of Our Lady of Lourdes Interparish School, many of whom had been baptized by Msgr. Flanagan, prayed for him several times each day.

Fading in and out of consciousness in the hospital, he couldn’t concentrate enough to pray.

“But you do think about Jesus,” he stated.

And he knew other people were praying for him.

“I somehow could feel it,” he said. “I could feel an energy beyond myself.”

He began to bounce back and steadily moved toward full recovery.

A member of his medical team told him, “What happened to you is miraculous. No question about it.”

“Prayers made a huge difference,” Msgr. Flanagan said in an interview several weeks later. “And I could feel that there was powerful prayer going on.

“Jesus came that we may have life and have it to the full,” he stated. “That’s always my favorite Scripture passage. And I believe I am having it to the full! In union with him.”

Easter people

Msgr. Flanagan, 87, doesn’t need to understand why he gets to continue ministering while his twin brother, who once served as pastor of Visitation Parish in Vienna, passed away in 2023.

“Life is a cycle of death and resurrection,” said Msgr. Flanagan. “We die, we rise! We’re low, we come up back again. And if we believe in resurrection, then the Lord will keep raising us up, and we’ll keep walking away from the tomb.”

While celebrating his priestly anniversary and recovering from recent heart surgery, Msgr. Flanagan asks for further intercessory prayer — the kind that through God’s goodness has given him hope to continue ministering to the people he loves.

He also requests prayers for the Church and for vocations and “that whatever God has planned will be done.”

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