St. Sabina’s Michael Pfleger, "a man on fire" in 2011. A page in Windy City Catholicism of a story unfolding even as we speak . . .

From the online pages of Chicago Catholic News, whose day came and went. Unwept, unhonour'd, and unsung, thank you, Sir Walter Scott . . .

“I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”

– Percy B. Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”

“We lepers.”

– Fr. Damien to his flock on Molokai

The Rev. Michael Pfleger is no Shelley, but he has a Romantic’s intensity of personal experience and self-absorption. He’s also a paradigm of latter-day Roman Catholic activism who has found in Robert McClory his perfect delineator.

Indeed, it could be argued that Pfleger has answered the call to action more perfectly than any other, making him and McClory a match made in Detroit, home of the Call to Action movement with which McClory is closely identified.

Neither is big on a Divine Providence approach to being Catholic. Instead they put their chips on a firm belief in the power of human beings to change the course of history.

At issue is McClory’s grimly fascinating new book, “Radical Disciple: Father Pfleger, St. Sabina Church, and the Fight for Social Justice” (Lawrence Hill Books).

St. Sabina is the South Side parish for whom “the music died” when black bullets cut down white teens on an August night in 1966. It was the end of a quixotic attempt at stemming mass immigration for which the well-meaning pastor had hired Saul Alinsky as helper.

Fr. Pfleger came in 1981 as de facto pastor. He might have adapted Fr. Damien’s famous sermon opening, saying “We victims” or “We deep-down pissed-off victims.”

In any case, he identified with his parishioners, among other things transforming the Sunday mass into three hours of boisterous Bible reading, song and music, with offertory, consecration and communion as anticlimax.

The Jesuit Matteo Ricci did something comparable in 17th-century China, adopting the “Chinese rites” — Confucianism baptized — as a way to bridge a cultural gap. But fellow missionaries — Franciscans and Dominicans — objected and convinced the Vatican that Ricci had gone too far, eleven years later reversing itself.

Nothing comparable has happened to Fr. Pfleger at St. Sabina, where the drums go bang, the cymbals clang, the horns they blaze away and when the spirit moves people, they shout “Hallelujah.” Yes, indeed!

“Those people really love Jesus,” Cardinal Bernardin said after slipping in one Sunday to see what the fuss was about. The Jesus love translates to a commitment to “justice,” or social action. “The Bible is the most social action book ever written,” says Pfleger. Yes. Religious faith baptized as community action.

Pfleger vandalized billboards — “painting the town red,” McClory entitles a chapter. Youngsters at his direction bought beer illegally, exposing city ordinance violations. He and Father George Clements sat in at bong shops and got arrested. With 200 protestors at his back on a suburban sidewalk, Pfleger threatened to “snuff” a gun dealer, claiming later that he hadn’t known what the word meant.

Never mind. He’s a man on fire, a Carry Nation-cum-Eliot Ness crusading against cigarettes and whiskey, drug paraphernalia, guns. It’s his religion. He flexes spiritual muscles in the face of injustice. Nothing else matters, not even — least of all? — the Catholic Church, which he boasts he can do without because he has God on his side.

He challenges his people: emulate him or go somewhere else to church. Declining the challenge, a longtime parishioner does go elsewhere, apparently (McClory does not press him) wanting something more rewarding in a personal-spiritual sense.

Guest preachers are welcomed, their reputations for righteous anger preceding them and fattening attendance for the day. So does activism, on an ongoing basis. Pursuit of a clear-cut grievance is an organizing tool, success is measured in enhanced member loyalty as much as in redressing the grievance.

Sharpton, Belafonte, Farrakhan, Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson come and go — fire-breathers all, preaching the gospel as social change, protest, rebellion, electing Democrats.

A Democrat arrived as a presidential candidate in 2003, Al Sharpton. Cardinal George objected to his appearance, calling up the all-purpose abortion-support issue, to no avail. Mayor Daley approved. Sharpton took the pulpit and scored politically, mocking Bush, “deriding him for everything from pushing tax cuts for the wealthy to failing to capture Osama bin Laden,” the Trib reported.

Sharpton offered “pure candidate-talk,” I wrote at the time. He inveighed against missile-defense systems and a half dozen other claimed abuses, urging worshipers to “send Bush back to Texas.” In the middle of his 35 minutes, he slipped in a few verses from Joshua.

His listeners gave him repeated standing ovations. People shouted, poked the right hand up, applauded. Pfleger, seated behind the lectern-pulpit, periodically stood and raised his hand as an applause point approached, sometimes as it crescendoed.

Tom Roeser later described the St. Sabina mass in general as “polluted with railing and shouting . . . and partisan Democratic politics,” evidence for McClory of bias and insensitivity — the book’s only really barbed comment. But the 2003 Sharpton performance backs Roeser up.

When you get down to it, Sharpton’s a rascal. He made his bones nationally in 1987 by promoting the Tawana Brawley hoax, falsely accusing (white) law-enforcers in upstate New York. In 1991 he stirred up crowds before the Crown Heights (Brooklyn) riot in which a rabbinical student was killed. “If the Jews want to get it on,” he told his street audience, “tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.” Tough guy.

In 1995 in Harlem, he harangued protesters, telling them, “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business.” It was yelling fire in a crowded street. Days later eight people were shot dead in a Jewish-owned store, which was then burned.

By 2003 he had acquired a national audience. St. Sabina was glad to have him. He was a black man reaching for the stars, however improbably, and that other stuff was easily forgotten or, more likely, was not held against him. And Pfleger went with the flow, reveling in the experience.

Another honored guest, not to mention friend and adviser, is the Jew-baiter Louis Farrakhan, widely known for vulgar and harsh commentary: Judaism “a gutter religion,” Hitler “a great man,” etc. “A decree of death has been passed on America,” he announced in Harlem in 1997. “The judgment of God has been rendered and she must be destroyed.”

Don’t worry about that, we are told. Black preachers regularly use “deliberate exaggeration” and “wild, inventive metaphors,” McClory says, reporting on an apparently self-serving discussion by black academics of “the inability of most whites to grasp the nature of black preaching.”

McClory should be careful. He can hurt himself patting himself on the back that way. May I suggest another possibility? Most whites get it and don’t like it, finding “deliberate exaggeration” and “wild, inventive metaphors” not only tedious but misleading, sometimes dangerously so.

Pfleger is embarrassed by none of it. He talks that way himself, as in his more recent notorious anti-Hillary Clinton performance. And he excuses Farrakhan. In January of 1990, when the parish honored him, Pfleger explained away his anti-Semitism as political commentary about Israel — a standard leftist ploy. “If a man subscribes to a policy that is wrong, then a man dirties a religion,” said Pfleger. Catholics “have dirtied Christianity” by supporting segregation in Chicago.

Now you see it, now you don’t. Not even good sophistry there. Among other things, Pfleger is a Catholic slamming Catholics, but Farrakhan is a Muslim slamming Jews — and certainly not offering observations about geopolitics.

Pfleger pours it on. In 1993 he was “amazed,” he said in a letter to the Sun-Times, at how much was made by “the media in this city” of Farrakhan’s “relationship to the Jewish community.” Amazed? Nah. How’s playing dumb?

Farrakhan is a man of principle, answering to no man, only to God. He is “unafraid to say what he thinks and believes because his strength is found in God and not in man,” and people can’t handle that. His is “a prophetic voice,” said Pfleger.

No wonder the normally ebullient Monsignor John Egan, venerated warhorse of the social-action brigade and no mean hand-shaker, froze when he and Pfleger came upon each other at the Call to Action conference at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare in November, 1994, with half a dozen people looking on. The standoff ended after a few seconds when Pfleger made his move, breaking into a smile and embracing Egan.

Egan must have been deeply offended at Pfleger’s full-throated endorsement of Farrakhan. He supported Pfleger publicly, McClory tells us. It couldn’t have been easy.

A week later, the irrepressible Pfleger, as if to make amends for his embrace of an obvious Farrakhan enemy, appeared in the Sun-Times avowing that Farrakhan had “raised serious questions regarding Jewish power, Jewish influence . . . in particular Jewish power in the media . . .” Farrakhan’s commentary, he said, was like “peeling an onion. It makes you cry but you have to keep peeling it anyway.” So as to keep after the Jewish question, apparently.

McClory missed a good book possibility, with possible titles, “Father Pfleger and The Jews” or “Father Coughlin Revisited.” Something on that order.

Five years later, the problem hadn’t gone away. Farrakhan was claiming a new identity, but a mainline Jewish spokesman was having none of it. “We’re not just talking about a phrase or two or a slip of the tongue,” said the executive vice president of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, speaking of the Farrakhan rhetoric. “We’re talking about a consistent pattern of beliefs and behavior that characterized him in the past — beliefs about Jews being evil.”

Pfleger was not impressed. Farrakhan was “absolutely sincere,” he told the Sun-Times in the same article. He talks “from his heart and from his spirit,” sometimes “out of hurt, pain and anger” and without attention to “phrasing.”

But so had Pfleger: “I understand because I have done that.”

And he would continue doing it, being loose of tongue and low on ability to curb it, as when he crudely lambasted then-candidate Clinton from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s pulpit in 2008. He didn’t know he was being videotaped, he said, excusing himself.

Yes. He falls upon the thorns of life, he bleeds.