Father Pleger being put out on the streets by Cardinal George in Chicago

I was scrolling across Technorati and saw a sad story regarding my friend Father Michael Pfleger.  I’ve been meaning to write a post about the fallout from his You Tube issue, but just haven’t done it.  The Chicago Sun-Times reports Father Pfleger is apartment hunting.  Here’s what the article had to say:

• This morning, Pfleger, the 59-year-old pastor of St. Sabina Roman Catholic Church, plans to move out of the rectory he has called home for 33 years and into an apartment in the surrounding Auburn-Gresham neighborhood.

• (Cardinal Francis) George telephoned Pfleger Monday night and asked him to take a sabbatical for a month or so. When Pfleger balked, the cardinal, who has long talked of moving Pfleger from St. Sabina where he’d overstayed the archdiocese’s term limit for parish priests by years and years, told him to sleep on it, Pfleger said.

• “I asked the cardinal if I could stay in the rectory during this time and he said no,” Pfleger said late Tuesday night, after his parishioners held a prayer service and rally demanding their pastor’s immediate and full return to the parish, as well as a meeting with George to discuss Pfleger’s future and the future of the unique African-American parish he’s been instrumental in shaping over the last three decades.

• “I’m going to buy a bed and get some furniture from the church basement and move into an apartment in the neighborhood,” a deflated-sounding Pfleger told me, while the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ where Pfleger made the fiery statements late last month that got him into this latest donnybrook with the cardinal, waited to take him to a late dinner. “I’m trying to find out what [George] means by ‘a couple of weeks.’ There’s no timeline. There’s no date. Give me a time. It just says a couple of weeks. I don’t know . . . “

I haven’t had a chance to discuss these latest developments with Father Pleger but I am hoping to see him later this month.  Until then, I will pray for him as I do for Rev. Wright, and Trinity United Methodist Church.  Father Pfleger has received over 3,000 death threats since his speeches from Trinity were cut up for public consumption.

The ironic thing is that Pfleger was one of three white ministers Trinity invited out to discuss ways of dealing with and overcoming race.  Father Pfleger hates white privilege and white entitlement with a passion. Some may act as if it doesn’t exist, but I have always admired him for standing on this principle.