More than 300 members of St. Sabina Roman Catholic Church rallied with their pastor, Fr. Michael Pfleger, at the Federal Plaza in downtown Chicago Tuesday evening to condemn the Bush administration’s relentless push to war on Iraq and to call for peace. The group gathered for two hours of spirited singing, preaching and praying to voice resistance to what Pfleger and others called the Bush administration’s hypocrisy in threatening the Iraqi people with war because of Iraq’s current leadership while refusing to oppose Israel’s officials for their attacks on Palestinians.

Members of the racially mixed Auburn-Gresham community parish rallied around three key principles: their opposition to suicide bombing, their opposition to Israeli attacks on Palestinians -- including the recent and ongoing military attack on Palestinian president Yasser Arafat, and their opposition to the Bush administration’s relentless campaign for war.

Pfleger condemned what he described as the Bush administration’s ‘arrogance’ and ‘evil’ in pushing forward war plans that would take the lives of both American soldiers and Iraqi civilians, and denounced the administration for ignoring world-wide opposition to it’s policies in the Middle East. He also condemned the administration’s efforts to jam through congressional approval for an open-ended war on Iraq and in the larger region. He was joined by Rev. Paul Jakes, who decried the unleashing of bombs and military force “whether those bombs rain down in New York or in Jenin”, and by Rev. Walter ‘Slim’ Coleman, who compared the Bush administration’s policies to the advance of the four horses of the apocalypse.

Jakes invoked the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi and Rev. Martin Luther King in calling for people to work for peace through prayer and by voicing their concerns to their elected officials. Pfleger charged his parishioners with standing up to inequity and injustice in the true spirit of Christianity by vocally opposing both Bush’s proposed war against Iraq and the administration’s threat to broaden the theater of war throughout the developing world. Parishioners responded enthusiastically to his charge to remember that all people across the world, including Muslims, Christians, Jews and others, deserved to be treated with dignity and respect, and to live free from the threat of U.S. military attack.