Personal Asides: Fr. Pfleger’s Exhortation of a Crowd to Murder Should be Enough for this Chancery. But Will it?

After hearing the hatred-filled shout of a Roman Catholic priest urging a crowd to murder a Riverdale merchant and all lawmakers who vote against further gun control, I think the time has come…even for the leadership of one of the flabbiest archdioceses in the nation…Chicago…to remove Fr. Michael Pfleger on the solid issue of hate speech and solicitation to murder. Either that or stand condemned of fearing to interfere with threat to life made by one of its priests.

Pfleger, a white radical, urged a stormy racially mixed crowd gathered before Chuck’s Gun Shop & Range with his bad imitation poor black ghetto accent to drag its owner, John Riggio “like a rat” from his shop and “snuff” him. “Snuff” is the word used by gangs to wipe someone out. Further, the incendiary priest urged the same treatment for state lawmakers who vote against further gun-control. In any civil society, one who calls for murder and assassinations is a threat to civil peace—not to mention an insult to a Church that maintains it stands for peace. Like all demagogues, Pfleger gathers unto himself the cloak of righteousness; community violence, drive-by-shootings including of his own foster son. But sympathy must be long passed from that demagoguery. He has preached violence and murder.

Pfleger’s thug-like incitement to violence was taped by the Illinois State Rifle Association and distributed to the media. It is significant that while it has been played on the Internet and on selected TV stations, major newspapers in the Chicago area evidently determined not to run it. The reason is clear: the newspapers’ editors feel a responsibility to behave judiciously to protect society from violence are loathe to present Pfleger’s call for murder with which they would inadvertently play a part. But Pfleger’s emotionally unbalanced screed has so inflamed the community that the merchant’s life may well be in danger. And the Roman Catholic archdiocese…principally its Chancery…will bear the brunt of the guilt if something happens to the merchant or others.

Asking the archdiocese to take action is like pleading a cause to the deaf and dumb church officialdom which covers eyes and ears with heavily ringed hands to hear no evil, see no evil. The archdiocese has been notable for having a collective clerical spine the consistency of Jello pudding. Therefore the move must be made by the one institution that governs all—the Chancery. Action is not expected, due to two reasons. First, , the overwhelming philosophic direction of the Chancery as with the archdiocese has been…and continues to be…to the left. Pfleger is a close friend and associate of the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, aka “the Pout” who has run roughshod over the media in this town with few interruptions and whose Operation PUSH has often been in tandem with the unstable priest.

It has been not accidental that PUSH, which is a Democratic party adjunct and the Cook county Democratic party have cowed the trembling miters and crosiers of this town…caused them to bow supinely in the accommodative style of the late Archbishop Thomas Cramner…with continued and unrelieved ministrations to the ruling liberal Democratic junta which stands for abortion or demand and gay rights.

That is why Hillary Clinton got to take her presidential campaign with all the trappings to Mercy Home for Boys & Girls. Anyone who suspects that the schedule just happened to “slip by unnoticed” from this Roman Catholic chancery is a hopeless naïf. Not when the Chancellor is noted for his past as an outstanding 10th ward Democratic precinct captain.

The chancellor, layman Jimmy Lago (Jimmy being his baptized name, not James) was Ed Vrdolyak’s best Democratic precinct captain in the 10th ward when Ed was committeeman, alderman and chairman of the Cook county Democratic party. And while Vrdolyak changed his party, no one is imagining that Jimmy—who marched with that other icon of liberal protest, Caesar Chavez—has. Lago, who has been pushed upward in the Chancery bureaucracy by several archbishops and was promoted to the top post of Chancellor by this archbishop, is the symbol of all that is wrong with the liberal Democratic politicization of the archdiocese where first among equals are the Daleys, Eddie Burke, the Madigans, the Hynes, the Strogers and the Emil Joneses, good parishioners all…some of whom are Knights of Malta, crème de la crème and big donors no less. This Catholic archdiocese…with its ultra-friendly clerics cherishing their Dem pol friendships…is the Cook county Democratic party at prayer.

The Democrats’ agenda has been unchallenged by priestly suasion or sanctions despite their living contradiction of church theology and moral law. The smoke of politics has infiltrated the incense burners as it did once in old England. When Henry VIII’s mistress got pregnant, Cranmer dissolved the king’s marriage when Rome wouldn’t and when Wolsey refused. Wolsey later murmured on his death bed that “had I served my God with the diligence I had served my king, I would not be afflicted with such worries as are now before me.” The same murmur could be expressed today—except that the clergy don’t run things downtown. It’s Lago.

The source of this Cranmer-Wolsey politicization has long been Lago. And his promotion to Chancellor was made in callous defiance of assorted legal facts that lay major responsibility for laxity of priest abuse to minors at his doorstep. The Lago promotion upward to Chancellor served notice that there will be no reform, just continued Democratic political business, with a wink and a nod, as usual. Hillary Clinton’s triumph here…with the sanction of the leading center for troubled youth in this archdiocese…is an insult to the Church and a rebuke to those who had hoped to reclaim this archdiocese from the Democratic party’s strangling unmoral pro-abortion tentacles.

Second, inaction in rebuke of liberals is this archdiocese’s middle name. Pfleger’s tenure at Saint Sabina’s as pastor is an enduring rebuke to those good priests who have had to conform to a term limit pastorate from which Pfleger has been exempt…exempt because of Chancery timidity and cowardice that either agrees with his horrible political tactics or fears to remove him because of the bullying he has gotten away with. Time was when Pfleger was regarded as a civil rights priest, identifying with his congregation in the time-honored tradition of other pastors, white and black, Catholic and Protestant who identified with the poor.. That time has long since past. Pfleger now not just identifies with rabble, he exhorts it.

He has turned his ministry over to the entity, the bark and woof of the liberal, pro-abortion Democratic party…has attempted to use his church as a sanctifying agent for a party that stands opposed to the tradition of moral decency that Catholicism embraces. He has run a political left-wing Democratic party carnival at his church, touting multiple Democratic candidacies including that of Al Sharpton. Others are merely timid. This Chancery, because it shares the left-wing, redistributionist Democratic faith, has shrugged him off. Pfleger says he “supports” gun-control but that is not so. He supports gun violence and has proven so with his own admonition to “snuff” people out.

Now that Pfleger has espoused murder, will the Chancery act? The normal expectation is that, rooted in fright and cowed by a mélange of Democratic politicians surrounded by its ex-Cook county Democratic Precinct Captain Chancellor, it will not.

If it does not act, violence breaks out in Riverdale or elsewhere that suits Pfleger’s demagogic mood, blood will be on the chancery’s hands. And on the newspaper print media which, content to inveigh against “hate speech,” shrinks from the task of condemning this flamboyantly irresponsible emotionally erratic blond cleric who has been carried away with his own celebrity, savoring as he salaciously does the cheers of an unruly, violence-prone mob.

Well, Chancellor Lago; since you’re in charge, since you’re running things, it’s now your move.