Barack Obama Watch: Reverend Michael Pfleger – The Other Obama Spiritual Mentor

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=hgDyUsYeh9E[/youtube]

Reverend Michael Pfleger defends Farrakhan and Rev. Wright

Who is Reverend Michael Pfleger, the Catholic pastor at St. Sabina on the south side of Chicago?

Another Barack Obama spiritual mentor and/or counselor. The other two are James Meeks and Jeremiah Wright.

Christopher Hitchens’ latest column in Slate states: “In April 2004, Barack Obama told a reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times that he had three spiritual mentors or counselors: Jeremiah Wright, James Meeks, and Father Michael Pfleger–for a change of pace, a white Catholic preacher who has a close personal feeling for the man he calls (as does Obama) Minister Farrakhan.”

Pfleger is the Pastor at St. Sabina’s Catholic Church, on the South Side of Chicago. So I searched Westlaw’s ALLNEWS database for “Obama and Pfleger.”

According to the April 5, 2004 Chicago Sun-Times article cited by Hitchens:

• Friends and advisers, such as the Rev. Michael Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina Roman Catholic Church in the Auburn–Gresham community on the South Side, who has known Obama for the better part of 20 years, help him keep that compass set, he says.

• “I always have felt in him this consciousness that, at the end of the day, with all of us, you’ve got to face God,” Pfleger says of Obama. “Faith is key to his life, no question about it. [It is] central to who he is, and not just in his work in the political field, but as a man, as a black man, as a husband, as a father…. I don’t think he could easily divorce his faith from who he is.”

As Hitchens wrote, Rev. Pfleger is indeed an admirer of “Minister Farrakhan.” Ambushed by a Bill O’Reilly camera crew, Pfleger stated: “He has–first of all, he has not called Judaism a gutter religion of blood suckers. That is not what he has said because I have heard that talk. 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. I have great respect for him, ho has done an awful lot for people and this country, black, white, and brown. He’s a friend of mine.” (The O’Reilly Factor, Apr. 3, 2008.) Farrakhan spoke at St. Sabina’s on May 25, 2007. (Chicago Sun Times, May 10, 2007.)

Please Democrats nominate Barack Obama. If you think the Willie Horton ads were BRUTAL just wait until the GOP media machine ramps up Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger after Labor Day.

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