Just as Cesar did not learn to read in school, he did not learn religion in church. There was no church in the North Gila Valley; his mother taught him his first prayers, as well as the power of charity and nonviolence. The spiritual leader of the family, she transformed a folk Catholicism filled with Mexican dichos (popular aphorisms) into a rough moral sensibility that helped the Chavezes through their tough times. Her improvised ethical code was backed up by the formal Catholicism of Cesar’s grandmother, who had spent time in a convent; she taught the children Latin prayers and Bible stories. Chavez’s religious faith would not be shaken by the loss of his childhood or by his family’s trials. In Brawley, a regular stop on the migrant circuit, he was a crucero, an altar boy, who helped the priest celebrate Mass. Nor did his mild adolescent rebellion—it didn’t amount to much more than pachuco-style clothes and a taste for jazz—ever interfere with his devotion to the Church. Many years later he said, “I don’t think that I could base my will to struggle on cold economics or on some political doctrine. I don’t think there would be enough to sustain me. For me the base must be faith.”1
So it is not at all odd that a Roman Catholic priest was the one who introduced Chavez to politics in 1950. At twenty-three years old, Cesar was a World War II vet trying to make his way in the world. He had joined the Navy when he was seventeen, “mostly to get away from farm labor,” he told Levy. Two years later, in 1946, after serving as a deck hand in the Pacific and a painter in Guam, he was discharged. Like Gilbert Padilla, he was uncomfortable in the fields after the war. He worked in cantaloupes, grapes, cotton, and apricots. He tried his hand at celery, where he could have earned higher wages, but he didn’t have a buddy on the crew to help him, and he couldn’t learn it fast enough. “Oh my God it was awful,” he said. “I couldn’t keep up with the crew . . . I was soft. I quit about ten-thirty . . . It was animal like.”2
In 1948 he married Helen Fabela, a girl from a farm worker family in Delano. On their honeymoon they toured the California Missions, from Sonoma to San Diego. They set up house in Delano but soon moved to San Jose, where Chavez’s brother Richard had a steady job on an apricot farm and could get Cesar part-time work in the orchards. Chavez walked the streets looking for some job away from the fields but found nothing. Trying to escape low wages, he, his father, and Richard share-cropped strawberries for two seasons, but they could have earned more picking someone else’s berries. Soon two babies, one son and one daughter, arrived. Cesar was now a family man, unsure of how he was going to make a living and what he wanted to do with his life.3
When Father Donald McDonnell knocked on his door, wearing a Roman collar and speaking a scholar’s Spanish, Cesar was inclined to listen. When Father McDonnell explained that he was trying to set up a church in San Jose’s Mexican barrio, Chavez, who attended Mass at a Portuguese parish across town, was enthusiastic. Teacher and student had met.4
McDonnell quickly understood that his new student did not need to be brought into the bosom of the Church. What was lacking, and what McDonnell was particularly able to provide, was the connection between Catholic faith and politics. The injustice of the world had been seared into Cesar’s heart when his childhood toys were replaced by a short-handled hoe, but the great disjunction between the world of the North Gila Valley and the world of California seemed impossible to remedy. What Chavez had seen of politics had not impressed him. He had been on the periphery of union struggles in the late 1930s that had ended in defeat. Strikes seemed to be all symbolic show; union leaders were remote, union politics filled with debilitating internal disputes. His father’s willingness to walk off the job when slighted or in defense of others who had been mistreated was fine and dignified, but it changed nothing. One could hope to get out of the fields, but Chavez saw no basis for any hope in the fields, and without hope there could be no politics.
Father McDonnell was a professional of political hope. He was only five years older than Cesar, not yet thirty, but he spoke with the authority of a priest and the confidence of an intellectual who had worked on his ideas and was not just repeating a memorized doctrine. He had learned those ideas the conventional way, in school, from a favorite teacher and in the company of fellow, similarly inspired, students. At St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park, Father Joseph Munier taught the basic course in Catholic Social Action, which included careful readings of Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”), and Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno (“In the Fortieth Year”). McDonnell considered, discussed, debated, and worried over the encyclicals. He prayed for understanding. He and a few others formed a study group, “a seminary within the seminary,” to consider Munier’s teachings. They studied Spanish.
When he was ordained in 1947 and sent to San Jose, McDonnell tried to put those ideas into practice. He kept in close touch with Father Thomas McCullough, a childhood friend and seminary mate and who was trying to do the same in Stockton. Their pastoral duties were mainly in the Mexican barrios. McCullough got involved in a tomato strike, while McDonnell spent a lot of time at bracero camps. Their early experiences were encouraging. In 1948, the two went to Archbishop John J. Mitty of the San Francisco diocese and asked to be released from their territorially based parishes so that they could work exclusively with Mexican farm laborers in central and northern California. Mitty granted their request, and four members of St. Patrick’s “seminary within the seminary” became the Spanish-speaking Mission Band. Their ministry continued for twelve years, until 1962.5
When Chavez first met McDonnell, the priest “sat with me past midnight telling me about social justice and the Church’s stand on farm labor and reading from the encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII in which he upheld labor unions. I would do anything to get the Father to tell me more about labor history. I began going to the bracero camps with him to help with Mass, to the city jail with him to talk to prisoners, anything to be with him so that he could tell me more about the farm labor movement.” The lessons went on for months, and their relationship went on for years. Father McDonnell, Chavez said, “radically changed my life.”6
If there is a geometry of the soul, and if we could look at Chavez’s soul in 1950 before he met Father McDonnell, we would see two strong parallel lines, one marked “Catholic faith” and the other “anger at injustice.” Most of Cesar Chavez was bracketed by those two lines: Catholic faith up above, close to the surface, and easy to see; anger at injustice down below, hidden from sight. The lines were parallel; they were not contradictory, but they could never meet. Chavez was not torn between the two, stretched apart as if upon a medieval rack. It was not a tortured man who met Father McDonnell at the door. It was just that Catholic faith and social justice had little to do with one another. His mother’s religious charity resonated between the lines, but Chavez knew that charity was not nearly strong enough to right the wrong that his family had suffered in the fields. Father McDonnell rearranged the lines. Catholic faith, Father McDonnell argued, had everything to do with social justice. Traveling the streets of the San Jose barrio, Sal Si Puedes, in his collar and black suit, he carried four pictures with him to make his point: a worker’s shack and a grower’s mansion; a grower’s labor camp and the high-priced San Francisco apartment building owned by that same grower. Catholics had the power and duty to right this wrong, McDonnell argued, and he had the encyclicals to back him up.
Rerum Novarum and Leo XIII’s four encyclicals that lead up to it, although not without antecedents in the thought of Aquinas, were a significant departure in Catholic doctrine. Since the fifteenth century the official church had unstintingly condemned the contemporary world, and Catholic doctrine was mostly about protecting the power, claims, and prerogatives of the heavenly city in the face of the growing secular one. This trend had been neatly summed up by Leo’s immediate predecessor, Pius IX, who detailed his condemnation