Obama Quits Longtime Church Over Inflammatory Comments

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Rev. Michael Pfleger on Wright and Racism

The Post's Hamil Harris speaks with Rev. Michael L. Pfleger on April 28, 2008 following a speech by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

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"Our faith remains strong," Obama said. "I suspect that we will find another church home for our family."

Trinity Church also released a statement today, made available by Obama's campaign and signed by Moss, that said: "Though we are saddened by the news, we understand that is a personal decision."

Since Thursday, the Obama campaign had moved quickly to distance itself from the 59-year-old Pfleger, who has presided over his own parish, St. Sabina Catholic Church, since 1981.

On the Obama campaign's Web site, a "faith testimonial" from Pfleger that was online several weeks ago, in which he said Obama had the "intellect" to be president and likened him to Robert F. Kennedy, was taken down when the controversy over his comments erupted. The pastor's name was also removed from a list of more than two dozen priests and scholars on the senator's National Catholic Advisory Council, which is designed to court Catholic voters.

Pfleger voluntarily stepped down from the advisory post two weeks ago. It was unclear why he resigned, Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt said.

Obama's decision to leave Trinity might signal his final departure from a small group of politically well-connected preachers who counted themselves among Obama's earliest supporters, joining him just as the young lawyer surfaced in the hard-knocks world of Chicago politics.

Their financial and political support -- first garnered after Obama routinely met with pastors and religious leaders as a community organizer in the mid-1980s -- proved important in helping him win his first state Senate race, in 1996.

"He built a relationship with the church leaders based on their life stories, which they would share with him," said Gerald Kellman, who hired Obama as an organizer for the Developing Communities Project in 1985. "He appealed to the injustice and the inspiration, which they had encountered in their lives."

Pfleger, in particular, was impressed with Obama's work as a community organizer and supported his ideas on low-income housing and unemployment. "You have to remember, Pfleger's a community organizer, too," said Dwight N. Hopkins, a theology professor at the University of Chicago and a parishioner at Trinity. "He saw some part of himself in him."

Pfleger has donated $4,000 to Obama campaigns since 1995 and his parish was the beneficiary of $225,000 in earmarks Obama pushed through while in the Illinois Senate.

The fissure between Obama and the preachers reached a head after the release of televised sermons of Wright, his former pastor, touched off a national firestorm.

Obama first repudiated Wright's comments, in which he made critical comments about the United States and suggested AIDS was a government plot against blacks. But he refused to completely shut out Wright, a man he likened to a family member.