Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly says the story that started out being about Sen. Barack Obama’s relationship with his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, for 20 years has shifted.

“The story now is acceptance of the messages put out by people like Wright and (Nation of Islam minister Louis) Farrakhan by some in the media and others in positions of responsibility,” O’Reilly said recently on his show “The O’Reilly Factor.”

Among the “others in positions of responsibility” O’Reilly was referring to is Father Michael Pfleger, the white pastor of the predominantly black St. Sabina’s Catholic Church in Chicago.

When approached recently by O’Reilly’s producer for questioning about Rev. Wright, Father Pfleger said he knows both Rev. Wright and Minister Farrakhan, has great respect for both, and refuses to sit back and do nothing as they are torn down.

“A Catholic priest endorsing Farrakhan is no small matter,” O’Reilly argued.
Some years ago I invited Father Pfleger to lead a revival sponsored by the Office of Black Ministry for the Diocese of Brooklyn which I then directed. Nineteen pastors of significantly black parishes in Brooklyn and Queens met with him the next day to discuss their ministries.

The man O’Reilly lumps among “radical left-wing clerics who are doing great damage to their communities” I found to be an asset to the Church’s evangelization efforts.

I sense that the difference between how some journalists and people like Father Pfleger approach controversial figures such as Rev. Wright and Minister Farrakhan is this: One mentality takes a statement and runs with it; the other takes the time to get to know the messenger and the message in its complete context.

How can any observer maintain credibility by assuming that what is said to any group is accepted, internalized by all listeners?

Anyone who questions, for example, how Sen. Obama could sit under Rev. Wright for 20 years knows very little about people of color and how many of us respond to life in a society fraught with racism.

We get used to the venting from family members, friends, strangers. We listen to it the way one does when sitting at the bedside of a sick person whose painkiller has worn off and who complains oftentimes about the very people trying to offer comfort.

Sometimes we nod or shout in agreement because we really do understand. Other times we say nothing, allowing them to get the rage out of their systems. We’d no sooner take them to task on the issue than we would leap in front of an 18-wheeler with failed brakes.

Pain is such a common denominator that we may even continue to walk with such a person even though we’d address issues in a different manner.

So we listen – but we keep our own counsel!

Like people of all races, we may not cut our ties until association becomes a personal liability, the way it was for Oprah Winfrey, who reportedly left Rev. Wright’s church in the 1990s partly because of his more incendiary sermons and their potential impact on her business.

In the process of blasting Father Pfleger, O’Reilly dug another hole for himself when he said, “These people – Wright, Farrakhan and Pfleger – speak to children, speak to uninformed adults, carry some prestige in their communities. Yet who is challenging them?”

Uninformed adults?

The fallout from O’Reilly’s comments last year about his experience at Sylvia’s restaurant in Harlem when dining with Rev. Al Sharpton apparently hasn’t taught O’Reilly much about thinking before he speaks.

There are informed and uninformed adults among us all. But to call the predominantly black audiences Rev. Wright and Minister Farrakhan attract “uninformed” is in itself inflammatory.

Should O’Reilly be muzzled like Don Imus was?

I don’t think so. What he needs to do is go on back to Sylvia’s and have another meal with Brother Al. He’ll straighten him out, and he will do it as a friend or associate who has accepted O’Reilly, warts and all.

You see people differently when you break bread together.

Carole Norris Greene, a member of the staff of Catholic News Service, is a former director of the Office of Black Ministry in the Diocese of Brooklyn.