NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
For Cesar Chavez, social activism was about more than politics, race, or ethnicity. It was about justice and human dignity. It was about helping the world more perfectly live the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Born in Arizona in 1927, Chavez moved with his family to California during the Great Depression. There, alongside thousands of overworked and underpaid migrant workers, the Chavez family labored long hours in the fields of California’s fruit and vegetable growers.
At the tail end of World War II, Chavez joined the U.S. Navy. He hoped the military might provide him with a way out of agricultural labor. But by 1947, he was back in the fields. He soon married and began a family, eventually becoming a father of eight.
Change came for Chavez in the early 1950s, when he met Father Donald McConnell, an Irish–American priest who introduced him to the social encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII and Pope Pius XI. Inspired by the Church’s understanding of labor and human dignity, Chavez began working to organize and unionize agricultural laborers.
In the decades that followed, Chavez protested the unjust treatment of farm workers using the same means of peaceful disobedience practiced by Martin Luther King, Jr., while also drawing inspiration from his Catholic faith. Fasting, prayers, and pilgrimages all had a place in Chavez’s work, and wherever he and his supporters marched, an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patroness of his movement, led the way.
Chavez’s work with the laborers was marked by great successes—-including organizing multiple agricultural unions across the country—-and by great failures. His most lasting legacy, however, was demonstrating the efficacy of the Church’s wisdom and devotions in defending human dignity in the public square.
Fasting for agricultural workers, despite his own ailing health, led to Chavez’s death on April 23, 1993.
