CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) — When gunfire is common in your community, despair can come easily, and Fr. Michael Pfleger, the senior pastor at St. Sabina Catholic Church, said young people in despair might turn to violence.
“If I don’t value my life, I’m not going to value anybody else’s life either,” Plfeger said. “I think a lot of our young people don’t value their lives. They don’t see a future. They don’t see a plan. They don’t see a purpose in their lives, so they live day to day to day — sometimes hour to hour to hour.”
He said adults need to do more to intervene and give them hope. That means showing children they are valuable, talented and that they have a future. People who believe they have a future, Pfleger said, are less likely to throw it away.
“To the kids in our school, I always ask: ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ And they have to tell me at least three things,” he said.
Pfleger acknowledged that he's buried too many kinds lost to gun violence and added that such violence weighs on a community and its young.
“We are in very difficult, challenging, and despairing times,” he said. “We’ve seen this enormous growth of depression. We’ve seen people traumatized. When you go into a gathering and ask how many people know somebody who’s been shot, almost everybody raises their hand.”
When the community feels despair, he said people need to have faith.
“If you don’t believe in something greater than you and bigger than you, [then] you are going to be overwhelmed by the despair and overwhelmed by the fear,” said Pfleger.
Pfleger told WBBM that young people need more activities in their own communities — another part of a solution that has many parts.
Fr. Michael Pfleger is the guest on WBBM’s At Issue program, which airs at 9:30 p.m. Sunday. The entire interview can be heard above.
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