Background

Michael Louis Pfleger was born on May 22, 1949 in Chicago. After earning a B.A. in Theology from Loyola University and a Master of Divinity from the University of St. Mary of the Lake, he was ordained as a Catholic priest on May 14, 1975. Pfleger also holds an honorary Doctor of Divinity from North Park Theological Seminary. In 1981 he began a 40-year stint as the pastor of Saint Sabina’s Roman Catholic Church on Chicago’s South Side. Pfleger is white, and his congregation was composed mostly of African Americans.

Adopting 3 Nonwhite Boys

In 1981 as well, Pfleger adopted an eight-year-old black boy named Lamar. In 1992 he adopted a 13-year-old boy of black and Korean heritage named Beronti Simms, who would later die of natural causes in 2012. And in 1997 Pfleger became a foster father to a 17-year-old African American named Jarvis Franklin, who was subsequently killed by crossfire in a gang-related shooting on May 30, 1998.

Campaigns Against Tobacco & Alcohol Products, & the Jerry Springer Show

In 1991 Pfleger led a church campaign to remove billboard ads for tobacco and alcohol products from his parishioners’ Chicago neighborhood. When local billboard owners refused to take down the offending ads, Pfleger and some fellow activists personally climbed up ladders and 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.

Close Ties to Louis Farrakhan

Pfleger has long been a supporter and ally of Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Louis Farrakhan.

• In 1994, Pfleger told The New York Times: “I don’t think there is any group or religion in America that has done more for the African-American male than the Nation of Islam. I feel the real problem is, America doesn’t know how to handle Louis Farrakhan or the truth.”
• Pfleger attended Farrakhan’s historic 1995 Million Man March in Washington, as well as and subsequent mass gatherings such as the October 10, 2015 rally commemorating the 20th anniversary of the 1995 march.
• “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 in June 2002. “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.”
• In 2008 an interviewer asked Pfleger how he could support Farrakhan, “a guy who calls Judaism a gutter religion, who calls Jews bloodsuckers.” Pfleger replied: “[F]irst 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 attended a number of NOI’s annual Saviours’ Day conventions over the years.
• Pfleger invited Farrakhan to speak at St. Sabina’s Church several times.
• In May 2019, the Nation of Islam publication The Final Call stated that Pfleger and Louis Farrakhan “have been friends and brothers in faith for over 30 years,” calling it “a friendship of mutual respect that transcends race and religious ideology.”
• When Facebook announced in 2019 that it was banning Farrakhan from its social media platforms, Pfleger immediately denounced the decision and invited the NOI leader to use the pulpit of St. Sabina’s Church to address the ban during a May 9 community event and rally to be held on Farrakhan’s behalf. Said Pfleger when announcing the planned event: “It is dangerous to me when we begin to stop free speech and seek to silence prophetic voices. There are many who say that they do not like Minister Farrakhan because all they have heard is various soundbites.  Perhaps that is why Facebook wanted to ban him, to keep people from hearing his whole talk, his entire message and the truth that he seeks to teach us. I do not know of another man in America who can fill arenas around this country, oftentimes with many of them, if not a majority of them, not Muslim but simply want to love the Minister and hear his teachings.”

Urging Parishioners to Counsel Prostitutes & Drug Dealers

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.”

Accusations of Racism in School Athletic League

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 said they 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 in response. “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.”

Condemning Israel

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.

Pfleger Invites Harry Belafonte to Preach At Saint Sabina’s

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 Louis Farrakhan, Barack Obama, Al Sharpton, and Cornel West.

MLK Day Sermon of 2003: Condemning American Racism & Injustice

On Martin Luther King Day — January 20, 2003 — Pfleger delivered a sermon replete with condemnations of America as a nation of racism and injustice. Some excerpts:

• “It is a Midnight Hour when we continue to spend more money on building our prisons than we do on educating our children and when yet in America today, the quality of education continues to depend on the color of your skin, the neighborhood that you live in and your status and class in society.”
• “It’s a Midnight Hour when gun manufacturers and distributors and the NRA under the disguise of rights to hunt, continue to market guns as part of America’s new wardrobe and continue to arm gangs and criminals out of back rooms and back allies of our cities, and then just like the tobacco and alcohol companies, seek like Pilate to wash their hands of the responsibility and accountability, of their death dealing …”
• “It’s a Midnight Hour when we continue to incarcerate a disproportionate number of people of color — locking them up — giving them records and then provide them with no means of re-entering society or starting over again.”
• “[I]t is a Midnight Hour when we have relegated the term abortion only to what goes on in a womb and at a clinic but have failed to declare that whenever a life is not able to reach its God-given potential and achieve the high calling and the purpose God has ordained it for before the foundations of the world. Whenever a life is not allowed to achieve its purpose, it is abortion.”
• “We are in a Midnight Hour when America’s greatest addiction is not crack nor cocaine, its still racism!”
• “We still grow up under the assumption in this country that for one to climb up in status, someone else must be kept down.”
• “It is a Midnight Hour when rites of expectancy, entitlement, privilege, white supremacy and good old boys network still exist in politics and board rooms across this country …”
• “[W]e presently have a President [George W. Bush] who has demonstrated by his actions since taking the oath of office to be anti-Civil Rights and … attacks Affirmative Action at the University of Michigan.”
• “[W]e’re living in a Midnight Hour that is seeking to sweep us up in a flag waving, flag draping madness of false patriotism that is seeking to silence disagreement and dissent and bring about a collective amnesia of truth. Brothers and sisters we may be living under a government [headed by President Bush] that stole an election, but we must not allow it to steal our minds and our thinking.”
• “We are being led and manipulated by a campaign of fear, to keep us untrusting and afraid, focused across an ocean, so that we might ignore the terrorism of homelessness, the terrorism of poverty, the terrorism of unemployment, the terrorism of unequal education and miseducation, the terrorism of lack of healthcare, and racial profiling and an AIDS epidemic that is killing brothers and sisters not just in Africa but right here in America.”
• “[W]e must not be so bamboozled as to think we cannot catch Bin Laden. You see, as long as he’s out there, it adds fuel to the campaign of fear. America needs a villain, a boogie man to point to, to fear, and to blame, so that we do not have to look in the mirror of self-reflection.”
• “Have we as a nation been hurt and have not thousands of innocent people lost their lives in the atrocity of 9/11? My God yes! But sisters and brothers, pain and hurt does not give us the license to be immoral. It does not give us the right to arrogantly tell countries who they can and cannot have as leaders, no matter what we think of them. It does not give us the right to become world bullies that send out messages that we want leaders dead or alive and either you are with us or against us, and it does not license us or justify us to go down a path of violence and bombs that now we find ourselves obsessed in a war that makes no sense!”
• “[P]eace can never come and will never come through the weapons of war or through the barrel of a gun. Oh, making a war may be easier than making peace, but it is a band-aid solution to a cancerous sickness, and if we continue in this path of violence and war, we shall reap its harvest, birthing many more Osamas, filled with hatred and a vengeance to kill and destroy.”

Pfleger Invites Islamist to Speak at Saint Sabina’s

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.”

Crusade to Increase Black & Hispanic Representation on TV

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 League of United Latin American Citizens, the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, the National Urban League, and the Rainbow / PUSH Coalition.

Close Ties to Barack Obama

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 state senate 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. (After Obama’s 2004 election to the U.S. Senate, he would earmark an additional $100,000 in federal tax money for Pfleger’s work.)

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, and in 2007-08 he donated $1,500 to Obama’s presidential campaign.

Obama described Pfleger a “dear friend” who had helped to shape his “moral compass.”

Anti-Gun Activism (2007-2020)

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.” “Chuck’s becomes the poster boy for this issue,” Pfleger added. “We need tougher gun laws so the kids are not dying in the streets.” 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] out” him — a common 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. 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.

On June 6, 2015, Pfleger led an anti-gun rally outside of the aforementioned Chuck’s Gun Shop along with Jesse Jackson and Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Said Pfleger at the event:

“I’m not a gun grabber, I’m a life lover. And I love life more than the death that they are perpetrating. I’m just tired, tired of the NRA. Tired of them prostituting themselves and buying politicians in this country. I’m tired of gun manufacturers and John Riggio from Chuck’s making money off the blood running down our streets, and our children laying in cemeteries. While they live in gated communities where there are no gun shops like Chuck’s. I’m tired of funerals of babies, while [the] NRA, manufacturers, and Chuck’s, run to the bank making profits from death…. And finally, NRA, understand: At the end of the day you can argue with us [and] you can call us names, but you got to deal with God. And the blood of our children is on your hands. And you will pay for the murder of our children.”

A publicity photo of Pfleger that was shared on Saint Sabina’s website in 2020 showed him speaking at a rally against firearms ownership.

Close Ties to Rev. Jeremiah Wright

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.”

Pfleger’s High Regard for the Black Panthers

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 told Trumpet magazine, a publication of Rev. Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ, in 2008.

Smearing America As a Racist, Evil Nation, & Supporting Reparations for Slavery (2006-2013)

At the February 2006 funeral of Coretta Scott King, Pfleger said that America’s “greatest addiction is to racism.” In a similar vein, on August 29, 2007 he stated that blacks in the United States were in constant danger of being attacked or exploited by white racists. “African American life in America is still threatened and still at risk,” he said.

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 said in 2008, “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 …”

On May 25, 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.”

• 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.”
• Pfleger impugned white Americans for failing to understand the responsibility they all bore for the historical and continuing afflictions of the black community, saying: “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.”
• 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. The he added: “She wasn’t the only one crying. There was a whole lot of white people cryin’.”
• Pfleger declared that “America is the greatest sin against God.”

When portions of this May 25 sermon were aired widely by the media, Barack Obama denounced Pfleger’s rhetoric as “divisive” and “backward-looking,” and soon thereafter he announced that he was leaving Trinity church. Saint Sabina’s Church, meanwhile, suspended Pfleger for three weeks.

On March 25, 2012 — one month after the death of  Trayvon Martin, a black teen who had been shot and killed in an altercation with a “white Hispanic” man named George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida — Pfleger preached from his pulpit: “We cannot talk about Trayvon Martin without talking about the racism that is alive and well in America today. America, we demand you deal with race.” Pfleger wore a hoodie while delivering his sermon, to emphasize the notion that Zimmerman, prior to his altercation with Martin, had viewed the latter as a suspicious-looking individual because that article of clothing was commonly associated with young black criminals. “Jesus wore a hood,” Pfleger shouted. “Is he suspicious?”

On July 20, 2013 in Chicago, Pfleger spoke at a large “Justice for Trayvon” rally sponsored by Al Sharpton‘s National Action Network, in memory of the late Trayvon Martin. Among the five-to-ten thousand people (predominantly African-American) in attendance were representatives of radical groups like the International Socialist Organization, the Revolutionary Communist Party, Occupy Chicago, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Angered by the “not guilty” verdict that a jury had recently rendered in George Zimmerman’s trial for second-degree murder, Pfleger declared that “racism is in the DNA of America”; he called for a “social justice” revolution; and he demanded that the federal government allocate additional funding for poor people. “We will not tolerate the killing of black and brown children, whether it’s in Sanford, Florida, the backwoods of Mississippi, Englewood … the genocide is over starting today!” Pfleger shouted.

Pfleger’s Hypocrisy on Anti-Gun Activism (2018)

In June 2018, it was reported that Pfleger, a longtime anti-gun activist, had been employing an armed security guard named named Henry Eugene Hale to protect his personal safety. The story made headlines after Hale was arrested outside St. Sabina’s Church on May 27, for possessing a firearm without a valid Firearm Owners Identification (FOID) card. After his card had expired in December 2017, he was unable to renew it because he had fallen behind on his child-support payments.

Supporter of Black Lives Matter

A publicity photo of Pfleger that was shared on Saint Sabina’s website in 2020 showed him wearing a t-shirt bearing the slogan “BLACK LIVES MATTER,” a movement in which he has been very active.

During the afternoon rush hour on August 28, 2020, Pfleger, in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, held a “Stop Killing Us” rally on the overpass of the Dan Ryan Expressway at 76th Street. The event was intended “to protest the continued racism in America that continues to make black men an endangered species.”

Supporting Joe Biden over Donald Trump in the 2020 Presidential Election

Regarding the closeness of the still-undecided 2020 presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Pfleger tweeted on November 4, 2020: “I think we keep wanting to believe America is better than she is, America was Birthed in Genocide, Built on Slavery and committed to upholding supremacy…When someone shows you who they are, Believe them! The closeness of this [presidential] race shows us again the DNA of this Country..”

After Joe Biden was declared by the media on November 7, 2020 to have won the presidential election, Pfleger tweeted: “Joe Biden’s election not only allows us to turn away from the lying, demonizing, separating of Families and fueling the flames of hate and racism, but now gives us the opportunity to Heal a Broken Nation, care for the Poor and disenfranchised & attack Racism.. now our work begins.”

Sexual-Abuse Allegations Against Pfleger

On January 5, 2021, Pfleger was removed from his role as head of Saint Sabina Church following the revelation that he had allegedly committed sexual assault against a minor many years earlier. Without providing any details about either the alleged abuse or the victim, Cardinal Blase Cupich, Archbishop of Chicago, addressed Pfleger’s departure in a letter to Saint Sabina’s congregation: “In keeping with our child protection policies, I have asked Father Pfleger to step aside from ministry following receipt by the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Office for Child Abuse Investigations and Review of an allegation of sexual abuse of a minor more than 40 years ago.”

In response to the allegations, Pfleger issued a short statement on Facebook the following day: “I can’t possibly respond to the hundreds of Texts, emails, and calls that I have received from all across the nation since yesterday. I am devastated, hurt and yes angry, but I am first, a person of Faith, I Trust God. Please keep me in prayer and the Faith Community of St. Sabina.”

By January 25, 2021, another alleged victim — the brother of the first — had come forward to accuse Pfleger of having sexually molested him in his youth. At a January 25 news conference, the two men, who were now in their sixties, gave details about repeated acts of sexual abuse that Pfleger had allegedly inflicted upon them more than four decades earlier. They claimed that Pfleger had molested them dozens of times, starting in the 1970s when they were members of the choir at Chicago’s Precious Blood Church. They also said the abuse continued for years afterward at the Mundelein Seminary and at two other churches, including St. Sabina. Both brothers said that they had never previously told anyone, including each other, about the abuse.

• The older brother, an Air Force veteran and former Texas police officer, said that because of the absence of his own biological father, he had viewed Pfleger as a “father figure” in his youth. The abuse, he claimed, began when he was between 12 and 13 years old. “You confuse love with caring, and this is an adult that cares about me,” the accuser said. “As a child, getting that attention — good or bad — was still better than being out on the street because I was scared to death of the street.” Describing the abuse as a “slow methodical process” that started with Pfleger climbing into a bed with the boy before making physical contact, the accuser said that Pfleger had molested him “a couple dozen times” over the course of at least five years.
• The younger brother, now 61, likewise alleged that Pfleger had sexually abused him multiple times, from when the boy was 13 until his mid-20s. Claiming that the experience had “destroyed my life,” he said he had turned to drugs in order to “escape” from “the situation that caused me a lot of pain,” and had gone on to suffer for more than 35 years as a drug addict. Explaining that he had kept silent for so long regarding the abuse because of Pfleger’s stature in the community, he stated that he now felt compelled to come forward with his accusations as a result of Cardinal Wilton Gregory’s recently televised discussion about the Catholic Church’s mishandling of its sex-abuse scandal. “I said, ‘I need to do something about this. I’m not going to continue carrying this burden. It was not my fault. I did not cause this, it was caused by another individual,’” said the man.