For the three decades Father Michael Pfleger of Saint Sabina Church has been a Chicago news maker, he’s kept the media consistently off balance.
Now there’s a book, Radical Disciple, by former Reader staff writer Robert McClory, that sets out to think him through. (The book project had nothing to do with the documentary project, but McClory’s publisher liked Hercules’s title so much that they got his permission to borrow it.)
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It’s not that he claims to have seen to the man’s core. “Anytime I’ve tried to psychoanalyze anybody, it turns out to be a miserable result,” McClory tells me. “What are the deep-seated roots of him? I don’t know, and I don’t think we’re going to find out much. He’s not that introspective a person who’s constantly examining his motives. He says, ‘The problems are there, of crime and poverty and racism, and you’ve got to do something about it.’ And you can hardly argue with him. And he’s thinking, ‘Why wouldn’t everybody think this way?’”
When McClory left Saint Sabina, he could see no way for the small black congregation to financially maintain the large complex of buildings the dispersing large white congregation had abandoned; he figured it was a matter of time until the archdiocese shut the place down. He met Pfleger in 1975, just after Pfleger had arrived at Saint Sabina.
McClory gives Pfleger’s critics their say. For instance, he introduces Tom Roeser, chairman of Catholic Citizens of Illinois and the City Club of Chicago, as a conservative Catholic who deserves our respect, and he allows that before Roeser accused Pfleger of “serious theological impropriety and flagrant disobedience” and condemned the masses at Saint Sabina as “liturgical nightmares,” he attended one or two of them. He lets Virgil Jones, once Pfleger’s right-hand man at Saint Sabina, explain why he doesn’t worship there anymore. Jones began to question what seemed to him Pfleger’s preoccupation with publicity. (“Are we overusing the media?” he wondered. “Why do we have to let them know every time we do something? Why can’t we just do it?”) He decided that the size of the student body in the parish school concerned Pfleger more than the quality of the education there. Sermons struck him as repetitive and too political. And he had career concerns: he didn’t feel he was being “developed as a leader,” because of Pfleger’s “way of doing things alone, his patriarchal style.”
