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Fr Jesús Silva, inspired by the 1938 film “Boys Town,” starring Spencer Tracy which he had seen as a child established the ‘Ciudad de los Muchachos’, or ‘Boys Town’, as a response to the problems of poor and neglected children in his native province, Galicia.
Father Silva was still a seminarian in 1956 when he came to the aid of 15 boys who had been orphaned or abandoned and found refuge for them in his mother’s house.
“Change was the fundamental element of our teaching,” he told the newspaper Diario de Navarra in 2009. “The idea was to change a world that we were dissatisfied with. We said, ‘Another world is possible.’ ”
The self-sufficiency and self-rule of the original Boys Town in Nebraska, which evolved from an orphanage founded by the Rev. Edward J. Flanagan in 1917, provided a model. At the Spanish charity’s property, Benposta, Father Silva built residences and schools to train the boys, as young as 4 and as old as 20, in a trade or profession.
Adults were assigned a supporting role. The children governed the town, electing their own mayor and cabinet, and voting on decisions in a two-house legislature. By the 1970s, about 2,000 children lived in the town.
The town had its own police force and municipal officials, as well as a bakery, grocery store and printing press. It even had its own currency.
More than 50,000 boys passed through Benposta, which served as a model for similar projects in Belgium, Colombia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Mozambique and the Dominican Republic.
Jesús César Silva Mendéz was born on Jan. 25, 1933, in Ourense. After graduating from Cardinal Cisneros College in Ourense, where he studied painting and drawing, he earned degrees in philosophy and theology from the Pontifical University, a Jesuit institution in Comillas. He was ordained in 1957.
The Spanish Boys Town, also known as Boys Nation since the 1960s, came into conflict with Galicia’s regional government, which wanted to build a football stadium on its property. It closed in 2003.
Full Story : New York Times
Image: New York Times
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