The infamous Father Pfleger of Chicago has withstood creating scandal before and even got an award last week from Cardinal George for his service. You have to wonder what will happen now that he has upped the anti by supporting woman’s ordination.
I never could understand how this priest could remain so long with only one public rebuke about his political comments which he followed for about a whole week or two. Part of the dynamic it seems to me is that he is a pastor of a church where the parishioners are mainly Blacks. He seems to be quite popular there and so there is probably a worry about what would happen if he was yanked as pastor. Though I think the main concern should be the content of what he teaches and how it actually conforms to Catholic teacher.
I also don’t understand his appeal among his parish. His Mass is like a minstrel show without the blackface. Like he is mimicking the stereotype of the Black preacher. I find it rather offensive that just because your congregation is a majority of one race that you have to change the style of how you preach to reach out to them. Kind of like when Hillary Clinton was campaigning and facing a Black church affected a slow Southern drawl and changed grammar.
Carl Olson puts it rather succinctly.
Fr. Pfleger is, by any reasonable measure, not only a “controversialist,” but a race-baiter, a loud-mouthed hater, a lousy theologian, and a heretic. His recent remarks are not the remarks of a “good priest and pastor.” Here’s hoping that he is disciplined in a swift and appropriate manner.
Should Fr. Pfleger be fired over this. Well I would say yes since he should have been removed some time ago. Heresy at the pulpit certainly needs to be addressed and I hope that Cardinal George will address this problem instead of making statements like he did last week.
…Fr. Pfleger has been a controversialist; and controversy is easier to report on than is love. Fr. Plfeger has spoken in anger, sometimes unjustly or uncharitably; and anger is easier to capture on the camera than is love. But Fr. Pfleger is a Catholic priest and a pastor, and in that capacity, like all good priests and pastors, he acts out of love. Ask his people. Ask the sick he has visited and the dying he has attended. Ask the troubled he has consoled. Ask the young people he has counseled and the school children he has supported.
As any armchair theologian knows, when people act they are seeking a good even when what they are doing might be objectively evil. Fr. Pfleger certainly might be acting out of love – willing the good to another – but that does not excuse his past conduct and especially does not excuse open dissent with the Magisterium of the Church and ultimately the will of Christ. What Cardinal George said can be equally applied to every priest and thus also any bad priests who are visited the sick, etc.
I would suggest that people email Cardinal George about this with a short and charitable message.
advertised I wasn’t much interested. It wasn’t until I read more about it and hear d and interview with Mary Eberstadt, the author, on Al Kresta’s show that I knew it was a book right up my alley. In some ways it follows in the tradition of C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, except this time an atheist convert writes a series of letters giving advice to the “new atheists.”