The white-wing news media is at it again. There must be an election going on or something.
After the storm that dropped down on Rev. Jeremiah Wright for the last few weeks, some conservative blogs and rags (the appropriate term for toilet paper) are moving onto attacking other religious and community leaders in Chicago--with the hopes of associating them with Democratic front runner Barack Obama.
During a Good Friday service this March, Fr. Pfleger, a pastor at St. Sabina’s church on Chicago’s South Side, bounded up to the pulpit and launched into a scathing sermon against “the stupid people.”
Despite the setting, Fr. Pfleger was not talking about those who had strayed from God. The targets of his scorn, rather, were those in the media – Pfleger singled out FOX’s Bill O’Reilly and MSNBC for special opprobrium – who had dared to cast a critical eye on a local prophet, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
That Pfleger would commit his church to a full-throated defense of the controversial preacher was no coincidence. For Fr. Pfleger and Rev. Wright share more than a zip code. In the tightly knit world of Chicago’s South Side, where churches dot nearly every street, Pfleger and Wright are close friends and political allies. And while Pfleger is white, he is in every other sense the mirror image of Rev. Wright. “Father Pfleger is the only black man I know in a white man’s body,” observes one Chicago pastor.
But Pfleger is not simply a white man heading a black congregation. He also is a devout preacher of the reigning catechism of the city’s South Side. It is an ethos of perpetual disenfranchisement that surpasses class barriers, and which holds that America, now as in the era of Jim Crow, is a fundamentally oppressive nation, especially toward its black citizens.
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St. Sabina advertises its politics on its door, literally: A blue poster on the rectory door proclaims, “We oppose war!” Inside St. Sabina’s cathedral, one finds red, green, and black flags – the colors of black nationalism. In this respect the church, the largest black Catholic church and school in the Chicago archdiocese, is very much a vehicle for the political passions of Fr. Pfleger.
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Fr. Pfleger is very much a throwback to that time. One can hear it in the stridency of his sermons, which he delivers with a barking staccato that makes him sound like a prize-fight announcer. One can see it, as well, in the appeals he sometimes writes to his parishioners, which he signs with the now-quaint idiom of a New Left activist (“In the Pursuit of Justice”) and in the fire-and-brimstone zeal that sometimes crosses the line from provocation into outright belligerence...
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Unsurprisingly, Pfleger often invokes similar themes. Echoing Wright, he calls racism “America’s addiction.” Taking a cue from racial huckster Al Sharpton, a former guest at St. Sabina, Pfleger has waged campaigns against everyone from elementary school sports leagues to the Chicago Fire Academy, charging that these institutions are racist.
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Pfleger’s political activism and his relationship with figures like Wright and Farrakhan might be of merely parochial interest, a curious glimpse into the troubling ties that run through Chicago’s South Side, were it not for the fact that Fr. Pfleger also is close to the most famous politician to pass through the community.
Pfleger says that he has known Obama for over twenty years. And while Obama worshipped at Wright’s Trinity Church, he is known to have made frequent visits to St. Sabina. Indeed, in one of the promotional videos for St. Sabina‘s, the Democratic candidate can be conspicuously seen in the congregation.
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Yet, the relationship raises troubling questions about Obama’s judgment. After all, the racially charged, Afro-centric sermons that have forced Obama to distance himself publicly from Rev. Wright are no different than those that can be heard weekly at Pfleger’s St. Sabina’s church. Sometimes it can be difficult to tell the two institutions apart. On a recent evening, for instance, St. Sabina’s played host to a sermon by the Reverend Otis Moss, a protégé of Rev. Wrights who is currently the main pastor at his Trinity United Church. (Making clear his debt to Wright, Moss in his sermon likened media criticism of the reverend to the crucifixion of Christ.) Whatever criticism can be leveled at Wright can be directed, with equal justice, at Fr. Pfleger.
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Now, as Obama seeks to distinguish himself from the likes of Rev. Wright, he must show that such echoes are only that. And he must explain, more adequately than he has to date, why voters should bet on him to achieve the racial reconciliation that his close friends and advisors, including Fr. Pfleger, have only served to delay.
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