I think Cardinal George is a good bishop, but he has the usual problem: an archdiocese that is filled with bad priests put in place by his predecessor. He can’t get rid of all of them because he doesn’t have enough solid priests to take their place.
And Pfleger is an especially difficut case, because he not only has the support of radical blacks, he probably also has the support of the Chicago Mafia.
And if Fr. Pfleger is removed from his parish, most of the blacks will probably leave too. Since it is only nominally Catholic in the first place, it’s hard to say how bad a thing that would be. Are you losing people from the Church, who might find salvation there, or are you letting heretics disperse elsewhere? Or some of both?
Not an easy situation to straighten out.
“Your Holiness, please for the love of God allow Father Freakshow to stay at Saint Sabina so he won’t get his stink on some other poor unsuspecting parish.”
Put him in charge of “development”.
It’s time for Father Pfleger to be moved. Priests don’t need to be setting up little kingdoms in their parishes.
Henry II: “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”
Just to be clear, I wasn’t standing up for Fr. Plfleger, who is a crazy, dissident, disobedient, trouble-making piece of work.
I was just saying that it can be hard for a bishop to come into a diocese like Chicago, which is crammed full of dissident, incompetent, and trouble-making priests inherited from previous bishops who let this thing build.
Like most troubled dioceses, they are short on vocations, and have fewer priests to go around than they ideally should have. If they got rid of all the bad priests, they wouldn’t have many left to say Mass. This is the result of several decades of malign influence from the culture outside the Church and troubled leadership within the Church.
It’s better than the fate of many of the Main Line and other Protestant Churches, which have simply fallen to pieces, lost most of their members, and can scarcely call themselves Christian any longer, because at least the Catholic Church holds on to its teachings, even though many of its bishops and priests fail to observe them as they should.
Probably Pfleger should go. But it’s not easy to straighten out a mess such as Cardinal Law inherited. It will probably take as many years to clean up as it did to make it. And in the meantime, the Cardinal probably has to frequently ask himself such questions as, which is better, a dissident priest who is weak on some points but not completely over the top, or to kick him out and have no one to say Mass in that parish because of the priest shortage?