White Priest Fights System From Black Pulpit

It’s a sweltering Sunday and the priest, draped in his African-style robe with a mural of a black Jesus in his shadow, is preaching the gospel of the ghetto: drugs, death and destruction.

“We are living in a New Jack City,” he says, his raw voice rising into the rafters. “It’s a place where crime is catching. It’s a place where murders are senseless. . . . It’s a place where police can beat somebody up while 10 more stand around and watch!”

New Jack City, says the priest, shouting, strutting and sweating, is more than a movie, more than myth. It’s a way of life and it’s everywhere.

“You can RUU-UN,” he chides. His flock cries back: “But you cannot HIDE!”

The chant ripples through the sanctuary, filled with black parishioners, draped by black nationalist colored banners, reverberating with black gospel music. St. Sabina is a black church. Its pastor, Father Michael Pfleger, insists on that. He is white.

Pfleger is an unconventional man in a world bound by convention, a blue-eyed blond with the face of a Vienna choirboy and the soul of singer Wilson Pickett, a priest who doesn’t believe in sacred cows--not corporations, not courts, and sometimes, it seems, not even his church.

“I think the No. 1 institution that has failed America is the church,” says the 42-year-old Roman Catholic priest. “We have become part of the status quo. . . . You can’t renew the face of the world if you look just like it.”

Pfleger is no look-alike. He challenges and confronts, riles and inspires, threatens and is threatened back, but the man who is a saint to some and a sinner to others never doubts that his cause is righteous, whether it’s fighting drugs, booze, tobacco or racism.

And he never doubts victory.

“The Bible that I preach and that I believe in says good always wins over evil,” he says confidently. “It’s never IF I’m going to win, it’s just WHEN.”

This cleric with a cause has gained national prominence, marching against drug paraphernalia,and getting arrested, protesting at the headquarters of G. Heileman Brewing Co., and getting arrested, and smearing red paint on alcohol and tobacco billboards, and, yes, getting arrested.

But each ended in victory. The state now has tougher drug paraphernalia laws. The brewer, under federal government pressure, this summer discontinued PowerMaster, a potent malt liquor that critics said was aimed at young black men. And the number of alcohol-tobacco billboards in his South Side community, he says, has dropped from 118 to 40.

In the billboard battle, Pfleger fought the law and the law didn’t win.

A jury recently acquitted him, even though he admitted painting cigarette and liquor billboards. He used a necessity defense: He broke the law to prevent greater harm from the products.

“Alcohol and tobacco are killing my community,” he says. “My kids shouldn’t have to grow up seeing 118 things that tell them to drink or smoke . . . (saying) here’s how you can have power, this is how you can be sexually attractive, this is how you can be successful.

“Life and death is a greater law than some paint on a piece of paper,” he adds. “They hide behind this free speech thing and in the meantime are allowed to be immoral. . . . When you saturate a community with two top killers . . . that’s genocide.”

Not everyone believes the priest is fighting the good fight.

Pfleger still faces two more vandalism charges and is named in a $100,000 damage suit. He has received death threats; his car windows were broken and his tires slashed.

Critics call him a publicity hound. Priests, he says, have asked him to resign or urged Cardinal Joseph Bernardin to suspend or discipline him.

Bernardin told him to stop defacing billboards. The cardinal said in a statement that he and Pfleger met a few times recently and “both of us have enlarged our understandings.”

Those less diplomatic say Pfleger preaches, but doesn’t practice the Ten Commandments.

“Pfleger has taken the position that blacks are not intelligent people--he will be their martyr, he will go out as their leader and destroy public property and be a vigilante . . . because black people can’t make their own decisions. He has to protect them from this evil product. That is just a total insult,” says Craig Heard, president of Gateway Outdoor Advertising, which has sued Pfleger.

Supporters see it differently.

“This parish is just not his parish--it’s his family. That community is his community,” church member Anita Beard says.

“In a way, Mike Pfleger by accident of birth is white,” says Giles Conwill, a friend and history professor at Morehouse College.

Pfleger, a 16-year veteran of St. Sabina, says he decided to work in the black community because he saw the greatest injustice there.

“I don’t pretend to know black people’s problems better than them,” he says.

The greatest hostility, he says, has come from whites, who have spit on him, jumped him and called him a traitor.

When he adopted a son 10 years ago, he recalls, people said that it was a wonderful thing to do but asked why a black child. Lamar is now an 18-year-old college freshman. Pfleger, who also has a foster son, says fatherhood has made him a better priest.

Pfleger was raised on the Southwest Side, a place where railroad tracks and streets divide the races, where Catholic schools flourish, where people are born and die as Democrats, as long as the candidates are white. But racism was never tolerated by his parents.

In 1966, one event changed his life: He witnessed neighbors and fellow church members throwing rocks and bottles and taunting Martin Luther King Jr., who led a civil rights march in a nearby park.

“I never met the man, but he became my mentor in terms of everything I believed about the ministry and about faith and about the church,” he says.

Pfleger became a priest and an activist: He worked in the Black Panthers food program and protested the Vietnam War.

“You either love Mike or you hate him,” says the Rev. John Calicott, a friend. “To me, he’s like the prophets of old in a sense. People don’t like to hear them, but they say what must be said.”

Pfleger ministers to 800 families at St. Sabina, which emphasizes African culture and a get-involved philosophy that includes working in a homeless shelter, anti-war marches and billboard protests.

“He believes a church is not just a building, but people doing things to make the world a better place,” parishioner Gloria Patillo says.

“If you want to be a wimp, this is not the church for you,” Pfleger explains. “A wimp Christian is the one who gets up in the church and says, yeah, God is all powerful, God is almighty, and praises him and shouts and sings about it and then walks out and says, I’m afraid to do anything about drugs. They may shoot me. I’m afraid to fight City Hall.”

Pfleger admits that despite his sense of belonging, he never will be a member of the black community and can never return to an all-white neighborhood.

“I sometimes feel like I’m in nobody’s world, but I believe I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing,” he says.