Priest who comforted victims of Hyatt tragedy in Kansas City dies at 91

He had been a University of Notre Dame football player, part of championship teams.

He had been an underwater demolition expert and U.S. Navy frogman who, during World War II, was tasked with clearing mines around the beaches of Normandy as part of the D-Day invasion.

But of all the achievements noted in stories and obituaries of the Rev. Jim Flanagan — a self-effacing and influential Catholic priest who died in New Mexico on Holy Thursday, March 24, at age 91 — none mentioned the almost saintly role he played during one of Kansas City’s tragedies.

It was Flanagan, then a priest working locally with the poor, refugees and others, who on the evening of July 17, 1981, rushed to the scene of the collapsed skywalks inside the Hyatt hotel. Once there, without pause, he worked his way in and over and through some 65 tons of broken concrete, glass, twisted metal and blood to be with the injured and dying, offering comfort and prayers.

A story in The Kansas City Star marking the 20th anniversary of the collapse, a calamity that left some 200 injured and 114 dead, recounted Flanagan’s role in the following way, starting with how he had had a nervous sense of foreboding for days prior to the collapse:

For three days, a nagging sense of death had haunted the Rev. Jim Flanagan, a priest at St. Francis Seraph Church in the East Bottoms. He prayed, asking God what it meant. He got no answer.

Then a colleague called about the Hyatt disaster and suggested he go. Flanagan realized that God had been preparing him for the tremendous destruction he was about to witness.

Even so, the scene — resembling a battlefield — shocked him.

“God, give me something to strengthen me,” Flanagan prayed.

He moved between the dead and the living, attending each through the Catholic rite called the Anointing of the Sick.

Flanagan’s name was the same as the priest from the old movie “Boys Town.” That strangely humored one buried man, who had asked Flanagan his name.

“That’s a great trick,” the man said. “Here I am under all this steel, and you are saying lies to me.”

Stopping near another victim waiting to be rescued, Flanagan asked how he was doing.

“Well,” the man answered, “my Timex is still going.”

Interviewed two decades after the tragedy, Flanagan said he continued to keep that moment and the suffering people in his heart.

“I really pray for all of them all the time,” Flanagan said in 2001. “Those who died and those who are still living. Those wounded and those hurting.”

That sentiment does not at all surprise those locally and elsewhere who have been remembering Flanagan and also remember the imprint on Kansas City beyond that night at the Hyatt. Flanagan worked in Kansas City, mostly in the inner city, from the 1960s through the early 1980s.

He helped resettle Vietnamese and other refugees, bought homes to set up a Montessori school and sponsored students from Africa and Central America and elsewhere to gain acceptance into college.

“He was super devout,” said John H. Purk, a Kansas City Catholic deacon and president of St. Michael the Archangel High School, which is to open in Lee’s Summit in August 2017. “When you talked to him, he didn’t just talk about Jesus and our Father and the Holy Spirit, he talked about them like he knew them personally.”

Purk said Flanagan, a man who he said “always saw everybody as a gift,” acted as his spiritual director for 37 years.

“The first time I ever met him, I walked into a convent on Tracy Street. It was in the inner city. I went to Catholic schools my whole life. I had been around priests my whole life. I said, ‘Father, how are you doing?’ He said, ‘Oh, I’m doing wonderful with the angels and saints.’

“I said, ‘Where are you from?’ He said, ‘I’m from heaven.’ I said, you know, this guy really believes what he’s saying.”

Flanagan was best known as the founder, in 1958, of a Catholic community of disciples in New Mexico known as SOLT, the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity, now headquartered in Corpus Christi, Texas. It continues to perform good works around the world, with 140 priests, 200 sisters and lay volunteers in 13 countries

Born in Boston on May 29, 1924, Flanagan attended Catholic schools before college and entered the University of Notre Dame on a football scholarship. He left Notre Dame in 1943 to enter World War II, serving at first as an naval underwater demolition specialist and later serving in the Pacific theater as a frogman.

Flanagan returned to Notre Dame, where he continued to play football, and where Purk said he also earned the nickname “Duck Out Flanagan” for his tendency to leave the field at halftime to pray at the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes shrine before returning for the second half.

“You know, he would not talk much about himself unless asked. Even his football career at Notre Dame or his part in World War II,” said the Rev. Peter Marsalek, who leads the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity with the title of general priest servant.

Marsalek said he had known Flanagan for 18 years, but it was not until two years ago while on a visit to Kansas City that someone else informed Marsalek about Flanagan’s actions at the Hyatt.

“He was a very humble and unassuming man,” Marsalek said.

He also described Flanagan as “always joyful” and deeply prayerful in way that was special.

“Whenever he would hear somebody died, even if he got a phone call at 2 a.m., the first thing he would do is get up and celebrate a Mass for that person,” Marsalek said. “It could be at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m., that is the very first thing he would do.”

Flanagan’s desire to help others, as he did at the Hyatt and throughout his life, lasted until the moment he died.

“When he was lying there the last couple of days and not able to move much,” Marsalek said, “he would make the sign of the cross and be giving a blessing. It was the way he was wired — seeing goodness in other people, seeing people as the children of their Father in heaven and wanting the best for people.”

Yet, Marsalek said, even that wasn’t enough.

“Even when he was dying, one of the last nights before he died,” Marsalek said, “he was saying, ‘What do you want me to do? What do you want me to do?” He was asking God. We were like. ‘Father, we think he wants you to let go. It’s OK.

‘Your work is going to continue.’ ”

This story was originally published April 2, 2016 at 1:58 PM with the headline "Priest who comforted victims of Hyatt tragedy in Kansas City dies at 91."