Disruption

If you were asked to name a Chicago priest, chances are the one who would come immediately to mind is Rev. Michael Pfleger.  Fr. Pfleger has been making headlines for decades.  He was back in the news this past weekend for closing down an interstate highway.

Fr. Pfleger is the longtime pastor, now senior pastor, of St. Sabina Parish on the South Side of Chicago.  St. Sabina's is a mostly black parish; Fr. Pfleger is white.  White pastors have been known to struggle with that type of pastoral assignment over the years, in Chicago and elsewhere.

But Fr. Pfleger has devoted himself to ministry to his African American community with an all-consuming passion that sets the bar for other Catholic ministers.  This profile in the Chicago Reader from back in 1989 by Robert McClory, entitled "The Holy Terror of St. Sabina's", is a highly readable overview of Pfleger's early life and ministry.  And it's remarkable how the qualities that McClory detected in Pfleger 30 years ago still ring true today.

McClory describes how the civil rights crucible of the 1960's helped to form Pfleger:

During his high school years, Pfleger spent two summers working at an Indian reservation in Oklahoma, and strangely enough it was there, 800 miles from Chicago, that he had his first conscious awareness of racial discrimination. "The situation was mind-boggling," he says. "The little Indian kids couldn't even go into the white man's store to buy candy. I had to do it for them." He was so incensed that he told his parents later he wanted to transfer to a school in Oklahoma in order to tackle oppression head-on. Said his mother, "If you want to fight injustice, Mike, you don't need to move to Oklahoma; we've got plenty of it right here in Chicago." 

He found out what she meant one summer day in 1966 when, at the age of 16, he stood on a sidewalk in the Marquette Park neighborhood, adjacent to his own, and watched Martin Luther King and his entourage march down the street in support of open housing. Twenty-three years later that watershed event still stirs his soul. "I saw the people I went to church with, the parents of the kids I played with, screaming 'Nigger!' and throwing rocks and dirt at King—these nice people I knew all my life. I couldn't believe it! And I saw Dr. King saying, 'We love you.' Man, I said to myself, either he's crazy or he's got a strength I want to know about."

McClory's piece also highlights two themes of Pfleger's ministry that have continued to recur in ensuing decades: conflict with authorities, and waves of publicity.  At each successive stage of his life, Pfleger has clashed with those in charge - school officials, seminary officials, diocesan officials and government officials, not to mention local business owners and drug kingpins.  And the local media discovered early on in Pfleger's priesthood that Pfleger, who is equal parts activist, rebel and public relations genius, usually has a good story for them.

Pfleger's national fame probably reached its zenith during the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, when he accused candidate Hillary Clinton of believing herself entitled to the nomination by dint of being white.  This YouTube clip records the moment, and also gives some insight into Pfleger's preaching style.  Pfleger's commitment to the people of his community has led him to immerse himself in the preaching and worship style of black churches, and over the years he has taken on some of the cadences of African American preachers.

That moment in the spotlight wasn't unique.  Every year or two, it seems Pfleger is embracing a new cause, making headlines, appearing on the local evening news, whipping up controversy and giving diocesan and city officials heartburn.  Pfleger's Wikipedia article (does any other Chicago priest merit one?) provides a lengthy list of issues on which he has engaged over the years, from drugs to prostitution to violence to Jerry Springer.

Last weekend, Pfleger was stirring the pot again.  On Saturday, he led hundreds of marchers onto the westbound lanes of the Dan Ryan Expressway, blocking it for part of the day.

"Expressway" is Chicago-ese for the interstate highways that run through the city.  The Dan Ryan Expressway (Ryan was a now-forgotten Chicago pol) is I-94, which passes through Chicago on its westward route from the Canadian border in Michigan to Billings, MT. 

Why did Pfleger and his followers block an interstate highway?  His short answer was, to call attention to violence in his community.  A longer answer might go something like this:

The gun control movement gets energized whenever there is a school shooting somewhere, but on the South and West Sides of Chicago, there are a couple of dozen shootings every week, with persons of color disproportionately the victims.  Like school shootings, many of the victims of Chicago shootings are teens and children.  But in the suburbs where I live, it's difficult to detect that anyone cares, or even notices.

In my view, the news media is not at fault for this apathy.  Our local newscasts run segments on shootings in Chicago every day, sending out reporters and video crews to crime scenes, interviewing witnesses and victims' families.  But the violence is quite localized - the great majority of the shootings take place in a relative handful of Chicago neighborhoods.  For those of us who don't live or work in those neighborhoods, the shootings don't seem to affect us.

But for the people who live in those communities, it's a dreadful source of stress.  Every time a child goes outside to play or walks to or from school, he or she may intercept a bullet.  And the risk isn't just out of doors: it seems to be commonplace that persons get shot in cars, or even while sitting in their homes.  It's difficult for us who spend our days in security to imagine what it's like to not feel secure all the time, every day, no matter where we are.

For Father Pfleger, that situation - black people getting shot; the white elite mostly not caring - is unacceptable.  And he isn't one to just stew over a problem like that; he acts.  And so this is what he cooked up this time: To raise awareness of violence in our black communities, we will go block the Dan Ryan Expressway.

What is the connection between an interstate highway and apathy toward urban violence?  It may not be readily apparent, but Chicago expressways are politically fraught.  They are thought to contribute to segregation and discrimination a couple of different ways:

1. They provide high-speed, limited-access corridors for suburbanites to get to the downtown business and entertainment districts while bypassing urban neighborhoods.  The expressways allow suburbanites to keep urban issues like poverty, street gangs, high unemployment and crumbling infrastructure out of sight and out of mind.

2.  It is widely suspected that Chicago expressways like the Dan Ryan were intended to be barriers between black and white neighborhoods in Chicago.   Black residents on the South Side lived (and many still live today) east of the Dan Ryan; Lake Michigan constitutes a natural eastward boundary for the city, and the expressway hemmed African Americans in by obstructing westward expansion of their communities.  At the time the Dan Ryan was constructed, the neighborhoods to the west of the expressway, including the politically potent Irish American enclave of Bridgeport, were mostly white.  So the expressways were a racially charged fence and a symbol of Chicago's segregated past and present.

Seen in this historical, social and political light, the idea of blockading Dan Ryan Expressway may be a little bit inspired.  For a few hours, the protesters might cause suburbanites steaming into the city for a Cub game or a shopping excursion to think about what goes on in the neighborhoods they'd otherwise be blithely zipping past.  Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass interviewed Pfleger a few days before the march.  Kass reports this part of their conversation:

“A Caucasian woman called me the other day from the suburbs,” Pfleger told me. “She was all upset about the protest closing the Ryan. She was angry. She didn’t want to drive on State Street. She said she was inconvenienced. And she said she wouldn’t feel safe driving through the South Side, that she was afraid.”

What did you tell her? 

“I told her, ‘Lady, welcome to the club.’ 

“We don’t feel safe all the time on the South and West sides. Mothers don’t feel safe when their babies are being shot off their front porches, little kids gunned down at parks. So welcome to the club, because that is what people on the South and West sides feel every day. 

“Inconvenience is the point: We want them to be inconvenienced, to think about what the South Side and West Side go through every day.”

I noted above that Pfleger has a talent, intentional or not, of ruffling important feathers.  But this past weekend, he may have excelled himself.  Chicago Police Department officials complained because the event would force them to redeploy cops who otherwise would have been helping keep other neighborhoods safe (although Police Chief Eddie Johnson, who is African American, ended up joining the marchers).  The Illinois state police, which has law enforcement responsibility for the expressways, handled the event with bad grace from beginning to end.  They griped about needing to deploy additional resources, and stated that any marchers would be arrested.  In addition, news reports indicated that the state police thought they had an agreement with Pfleger to leave a couple of lanes open to allow traffic to continue to flow; but Pfleger denied they had a deal, and his protesters blocked all westbound lanes.

The dispute over lane blockage also set Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, who is a Democrat, at loggerheads with Governor Bruce Rauner, who is a Republican.  Both currently are running for re-election.  A day or two before the march, Emmanuel, who is thought to be vulnerable to African American challengers, came out in support of the protest.  After the march, Rauner responded via Twitter:

I’m disappointed in the Mayor. There was an agreement in place. I am calling on the Mayor to take swift and decisive action to put an end to this kind of chaos. I will work with him in good faith and urge him to do his job so that the people of Chicago feel safe.

Emmanuel's response was succinct:

It was a peaceful protest. Delete your account.

My take on Pfleger's ministry is the same as McClory's was 30 years ago: Pfleger ruffles feathers and makes news because he doesn't flinch in his advocacy for the people under his pastoral care.  Pfleger perceives injustices coming at the people of his community from many directions; and he is not one to just sit and complain about it.  He acts, usually with direct and energetic flair.  His parish and his parishioners don't have a lot of wealth, but they have the Holy Spirit, and they leverage what assets they have - primarily their people and a friendly news media - to their advantage.

St. Paul urged the Roman disciples to "offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God." (Rom 12:1).  When I first heard about Pfleger's plans to lead marchers out onto an interstate highway in the middle of a Saturday, I feared there may be some sacrificial bodily offerings; my initial thought was, "This is a really bad idea - someone is going to get hit by a truck."  In the event, there were no injuries, and Pfleger and the marchers believe it was a great success.  He did what he always does: he took dramatic action that managed to tick off virtually everyone except for the people of his parish and community - and they are the ones he cares about.  If anyone wants to see what a preferential option for the poor looks like, I might just point them toward St. Sabina's.