Born in May 1949, Michael Louis Pfleger is a Roman Catholic priest who has been the pastor of Saint Sabina Catholic Church in Chicago since 1981. Pfleger is white, and his congregation is composed mostly of African Americans. He attended Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary South, Loyola University, and the University of Saint Mary of the Lake. He was ordained on May 14, 1975.
In 1991 Pfleger led a church campaign to remove tobacco and alcohol billboard ads from his parishioners’ Chicago neighborhood. When local billboard owners refused to take down the offending ads, Pfleger and some fellow activists personally defaced the signs. Pfleger was charged with destruction of private property but was later acquitted by a jury. When the Chicago City Council in 1997 voted to eliminate tobacco and alcohol ads from billboards in certain areas of the city, Pfleger celebrated the decision as “a tremendous victory for the children of Chicago, for our neighborhoods, especially black and Hispanic neighborhoods.”
In 1991 Pfleger led a picketing campaign outside the Chicago studio where
The Jerry Springer Show was filmed. Complaining of the program’s excessive violence and crude language, Pfleger in 1998 organized a formal boycott of the show’s advertisers.
In 2000 Pfleger encouraged his parishioners to purchase time from local prostitutes and drug dealers, and to use that time to try to persuade the payees to attend counseling and job-training sessions. When the Chicago Archdiocese distanced itself from Pfleger’s tactics, he responded, “How is what I’m doing not part of the Gospel? The church leaders talk about evangelization. Well, if this isn’t evangelization, I don’t know what is.”
In 2001 Pfleger objected when a mostly white elementary-school athletic league, the Southside Catholic Conference, refused to admit Saint Sabina’s parish school. League officials explained that the white players and their families would feel unsafe in Saint Sabina’s largely black neighborhood. “Racism continues to be alive and well both inside society and inside the church,” said Pfleger. “To be denied admission on the sole premise that certain coaches and parishes feared for the safety of their children is illegitimate, ridiculous and insulting. It is very troubling that the conference would insinuate that we would place their children in harm’s way.”
In September 2002 Pfleger
led a rally at the Dirksen Federal Building in Chicago condemning the Israeli army’s recent
destruction of
Yasser Arafat’s compound in the city of Ramallah.
In January 2003 Pfleger invited singer
Harry Belafonte to be a guest speaker at a Sunday Mass at Saint Sabina.
During his talk, Belafonte
blamed America for the events of 9/11: “We [Americans] move about the world arrogantly, calling wars when we want, overthrowing governments when we want. There is a price to be paid for it -- look at 9/11. [That] wasn’t just bin Laden. Bin Laden didn’t come from the abstract. He came from somewhere, and if you look where ... you’ll see America’s hand of villainy.” Belafonte also used the occasion to
criticize President George W. Bush for allegedly threatening every “woman’s right to abortion.” (It should be noted that the Chicago Archdiocese has had a longstanding policy explicitly forbidding the use of Church property, under any circumstances, by pro-abortion advocates. Moreover, the Church’s
canon law requires that only Catholic clergy be permitted to preach during Catholic Mass. Pfleger’s invitation to Belafonte violated both of these restrictions.)
Other pro-choice (
vis a vis abortion) advocates whom Pfleger (who describes himself as “pro-life”) has invited to be
guest speakers at his church include
Barack Obama,
Louis Farrakhan, and
Al Sharpton.
In February 2003 the Marxist professor
Cornel West appeared, at Pfleger’s invitation, as a
guest speaker at Saint Sabina.
On another occasion, Pfleger invited Kareem Irfan, former Chairman of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago, to
speak at Saint Sabina on the fourth anniversary of 9/11. A member of the
Islamic Society of North America, Irfan has
characterized Islamic beheadings of non-Muslims not as acts of evil, but rather as manifestations of “a primordial sense of retaliation and revenge.”
In 2004 Pfleger joined the Alliance for Diversity in Programming, a coalition of
more than 200 activists who demanded that Congress and the Federal Communications Commission compel television networks to increase on-camera representation of blacks and Hispanics.
Other members of this Alliance included
James Zogby of the
Arab American Institute, as well as representatives of such organizations as the
NAACP, the
League of United Latin American Citizens, the
National Urban League, the
Rainbow / PUSH Coalition, and the
National Council of La Raza.
In 1995 and 2006, Pfleger
contributed money to the congressional campaigns of
Jesse Jackson, Jr.
Pfleger has had a longstanding friendly relationship (since the late 1980s) with Barack Obama and has played a
significant role as a spiritual advisor for the latter. Between 1995 and 2001, Pfleger
contributed a total of $1,500 to Obama’s various political campaigns -- including a $200 donation in April 2001, approximately three months after Obama (who was then an Illinois State Senator) had helped steer $225,000 in grants to St. Sabina programs.
In January 2007 Pfleger
said that Obama, who had recently announced his candidacy for the U.S. presidency, “is the best thing to come across the political scene since Bobby Kennedy.” “I think Barack Obama is in a class of his own,” Pfleger added. “… When anybody comes with that much hope, whether it’s a Bobby Kennedy or whether it’s a Martin Luther King Jr., they do become vulnerable. They become vulnerable because they tell the country and the world that we can be better and we don’t have to accept what is. And unfortunately, we live in a world where not everybody wants it to be different.” Obama’s campaign would later feature
Pfleger’s enthusiastic endorsement on its website.
Pfleger’s support for Obama consisted not only of words, but also of action. He hosted a number of faith forums for the candidate.
In 2007 Pfleger and
Jesse Jackson spearheaded a
campaign to
shut down Chuck's Gun Shop, a firearms dealer in Riverdale, Illinois. As Jackson explained their rationale: “The suburbs have surrounded the city with these gun shops. Jobs are going out, guns are coming in.” Pfleger and Jackson led weekly
demonstrations in front of the store. During one particular rally in May 2007, Pfleger warned that he and his followers were prepared to “drag” the store’s owner, John Riggio, from his shop “like a rat” and “snuff” him -- a slang term for murder. Pfleger then proceeded to tell the crowd that legislators who failed to support gun-control legislation should be “snuffed” as well. (Click
here to listen to the audio of these remarks.) Jackson and Pfleger ignored police warnings that they would be arrested if they continued to block the store’s entrance; both were taken into custody and charged with criminal trespass to property.
In March 2008 Pfleger
invited Rev.
Jeremiah Wright,
Barack Obama’s longtime pastor, to deliver a blessing at Saint Sabina Church during a visit by the poet Maya Angelou. Wright at the time was embroiled in controversy over a host of virulently anti-American remarks he had made in numerous sermons. “I invited Dr. Wright because he is a friend, mentor and hero of mine and because he is someone for whom I have great respect,” said Pfleger. “I also invited him to feel and see the great love and respect people have for him…. Dr. Wright is one of the great biblical scholars of our country and the best of preachers in the prophetic tradition. Dr. Wright has been shamefully demonized by 30-second sound bites that have tried to re-define him into someone other than who he is.” Pfleger’s congregation greeted Wright with a
standing ovation.
According to Pfleger, “[Wright is] not bigoted. He’s not anti-American. He’s not hateful…. He’s a true patriot because he loves the country enough to criticize it and challenge it.” Expanding on this theme, Pfleger said: “America has to take responsibility for its actions around the world. And we have done some shameful things around the world.” (Click
here for the video of a sermon in which Pfleger angrily condemned Wright's critics in the spring of 2008.)
Pfleger's views on race were shaped, in large measure, by black radicalism in the 1960s. "I got very educated by the
[Black] Panthers -- very educated," Pfleger once
told Trumpet magazine, a publication of Rev. Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ.
Pfleger is also a
great admirer of Louis Farrakhan: “I’ve known the minister [Farrakhan] both as someone who I have great respect for as a prophetic voice, as a mentor but also as a friend and as a brother,” said Pfleger. “We’ve become very close friends over the years. Our families have been close; he’s shared dinner at my house as I have at his many, many times. He has preached from our pulpit here at this church on three different occasions. We’ve worked together on issues not only for this community but in the city and in the nation.”
On another occasion an interviewer asked Pfleger how he could support Farrakhan, “a guy who calls Judaism a gutter religion, who calls Jews bloodsuckers.” Pfleger
replied: “Okay, first of all he has not called Judaism a gutter religion and bloodsuckers [sic]. That is not what he has said.… I stick up for Louis Farrakhan because he is another person that the media has chosen to define how they want to do it. And they demonize how they want to demonize somebody.… I know the man, Louis Farrakhan. He is a great man who I have great respect for, who has done an awful lot for people in this country -- black, white, and brown. He’s a friend of mine.… He is not a bigot and he is not a hater…. He is a person who has had the freedom to speak about the injustices that have been done in this country to African Americans and to poor people in general.”
Pfleger has repeatedly
defended Farrakhan’s
Nation of Islam and has
impugned Jewish critics of that organization for their “narrowness” of mind.
Pfleger
views America as a nation infested with “classism and racism,” and he identifies white racism as “the number one sin in this country.” “Unfortunately,” he adds, “in America we don’t have a real good history of serving all its [the nation’s] people. Unfortunately in America there is a double standard society. And it’s as real forty years after Dr. King’s death. … Dr King, I believe, would cry today if he looked at this country and saw the plight of poor people ...”
At the February 2006 funeral of Coretta Scott King, Pfleger
said that America’s “greatest addiction is to racism.” In a similar vein, he suggests that blacks in the United States are in constant danger of being attacked or exploited by white racists. “African American life in America is still threatened and still at risk,” he
says.
In May 2008, Pfleger was a guest preacher at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC), where the recently retired Jeremiah Wright had been pastor for 36 years. TUCC's new pastor,
Otis Moss, introduced Pfleger to the congregation as a “brother beloved,... a preacher par-excellence,... a prophetic powerful pulpiteer.”
In his sermon, Pfleger argued in favor of slavery reparations:
“Honestly now, to address the one who says, ‘Don’t hold me responsible for what my ancestors did.’ But you have enjoyed the benefits of what your ancestors did ... and unless you are ready to give up the benefits, throw away your 401 fund, throw away your trust fund, throw away all the monies you put away into the company you walked into because your daddy and grand daddy … Unless you are willing to give up the benefits then you must be responsible for what was done in your generation, because you are the beneficiaries of this insurance policy.”
In the same sermon, Pfleger impugned white Americans for failing to understand the responsibility they all bore for the historical and continuing afflictions of the black community. Said Pfleger:
"It's like saying to a woman who's been repeatedly raped over, and over, and over, and over, over, and over [and telling her] 'you need to get over it.' 'The HELL I do,' [she would say]. Get the sucker who's been raping me and make him pay.' Well, America has been raping people of color, and America has to pay the price. America has to pay the price for the rape."
Also in that sermon, Pfleger made reference to a recent incident where Senator Hillary Clinton had cried publicly as she became resigned to the fact that she inevitably would lose her bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination to Barack Obama. Said Pfleger:
“We must be honest enough to expose white entitlement and supremacy wherever it raises its head…. [W]hen Hillary was crying, and people said that was put on, I really don't believe it was put on. I really believe that she just always thought, ‘This is mine. I'm Bill's [Bill Clinton's]wife. I'm white. And this is mine. I just got to get up and step into the plate.’ And then out of nowhere came, ‘hey, I'm Barack Obama.’ And she said, ‘Oh damn, where did you come from? I'm white. I'm entitled. There's a black man stealing my show.’” Pfleger then mimicked Mrs. Clinton crying as the audience gave him a standing ovation. Added Pfleger: “She wasn't the only one crying. There was a whole lot of white people cryin’.”
When portions of this sermon were aired widely by the media, Obama denounced Pfleger's rhetoric as "divisive" and "backward-looking," and soon thereafter he announced that he was leaving Trinity church.
