a decent family wage; the workers have the duty to join together in associations for their mutual benefit and to behave themselves properly; and the Church has the duty to teach everyone else their duties, and thus to guide society away from the debilitating war between the classes, and to the natural harmony of all.
The encyclical closes with a description of the essential character of the new worker associations. It is the culmination of Leo’s argument, his answer to Lenin’s question of a decade later, “What is to be done?”. The associations are of “first importance,” Leo writes, and are the instrument through which the workers “will rise from their most wretched state and enjoy better conditions.” But securing these better conditions, necessary to social justice, is not the primary purpose of the new associations. Within them, Catholic clergy and laity must guide workers to the conduct necessary for eternal salvation. Leo is unbending on that issue: “It is clear . . . that moral and religious perfection ought to be regarded as [the associations’] principal goal . . . [for] what would it profit a worker to secure through an association an abundance of goods, if his soul through lack of its proper food should run the risk of perishing?” Thus, workers must refrain from “violence and rioting.” They must not injure the property of others. They must not associate with socialists, “vicious men who craftily hold out exaggerated hopes and make huge promises . . . usually ending in vain regrets and the destruction of wealth.” Finally, Leo pragmatically observes that the workers’ righteous behavior is not only good for the soul, it is also good strategy. It will move the conscience of the rich and mobilize the resources of the state. Leo cites the early Christians as models: “Yet destitute of wealth and power, they succeeded in winning the good will of the rich and the protection of the mighty.”
Rerum Novarum provided papal authority for what came to be called Catholic Social Action, and for the next seventy-five years, up until Vatican II, the encyclical served as the basis for Catholic social doctrine. But Leo’s absolute opposition to socialism and his call for the reform of capitalism provided a large space for serious disagreement over theory, strategy, and tactics. In Europe, Catholic liberals and worker priests, citing Leo XIII, helped build Christian unions and worked to reform capitalism. Catholic conservatives, also citing Leo, developed the idea of harmony into a full-fledged corporatism, and flirted (or worse) with fascism, especially in Spain, Portugal, and Italy. In the midst of worldwide Depression, Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno, in 1931, built on Leo’s thought while stretching the space for disagreement to the left with its emphasis on the “social character of ownership,” its warning against individualism, and its assertion that “the right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free competition of forces.”8
In the United States, the Church received special dispensation to participate in “neutral” unions rather than to build separate Christian ones, and Catholic activists both helped build the labor movement and later joined the attack against Communists that so debilitated the CIO after World War II. The Reverend Joseph Ryan, a principal architect of the 1919 Bishops’ Program of Social Reconstruction, which called for a minimum wage, subsidized housing, labor participation in industrial management, child labor laws, and social insurance thirteen years before “New Deal” was even a slogan, later used Leo XIII as a papal shield against conservative Catholic opposition to Franklin Roosevelt’s program. Reverend Charles Coughlin—the popular radio priest who deserted FDR in 1934, defended the Nazis, and blamed the Depression on Jewish bankers—also was a great proponent of Rerum Novarum. The warring radio appeals of Ryan and Coughlin in the mid-1930s set the outer limits of clergy-approved left and right Catholic opinion during the Depression, but Coughlin’s trajectory alone maps the territory: in the name of opposition to Bolshevism and in support of the reform of capitalism, he moved easily from early Roosevelt champion to Roosevelt enemy without ever deserting the ideas of Leo XIII.9
Cesar Chavez would come to use Rerum Novarum in the same general way as other lay Catholic activists of the left: as doctrinal justification for building a workers’ organization. But for Chavez, Leo provided more than just papal support for his organizing work. When Chavez formed the Farm Workers Association in 1962, the precursor of the UFW, he called it an “association,” not a “Union.” Its potential members, California farm workers, were almost all Catholics, and Cesar Chavez’s piety was used as a way to attract and recruit them. Catholic symbols and ideology dominated the association’s, and then later the UFW’s, presentation of itself, to both farm workers and potential supporters. Membership in the organizations was not meant to be just about earning better wages and improved benefits; it was supposed to be good for the soul. Cesar Chavez insisted on this last point. In the struggle, farm workers would learn the virtues of sacrifice, and through sacrifice would become better people, closer to God. Even UFW strategy was leonine: the exemplary conduct of the farm workers in struggle was meant to mobilize the good will of the more fortunate and win over the protection of the state.
The hand of Leo was not only manifest in the organization, it also shaped the internal life of the UFW leader. Rerum Novarum, as taught by Father McDonnell, not only connected the two central claims on Cesar’s soul—loyalty to his mother’s religion and anger about his childhood disaster—but also was a basis for his famous will and intensity of purpose, a certainty that if not God (and maybe even He) then at least the Pope was on his side.
One other religious influence was formative for Chavez in this period before the founding of the union: cursillismo. The cursillo movement was begun on the island of Mallorca in 1932 by the young men’s branch of Acción Católica and was firmly entrenched within the right wing of organizations inspired by Leo XIII. The Cursillos de Christiandad were developed by the young laymen to inspire adolescent men in preparation for a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, the Church of St. James in Compostela in northwestern Spain. The actual pilgrimage was delayed first by the Spanish Civil War, then by World War II, and didn’t take place until 1948, by which time the cursillos, formalized during the period of waiting, had taken on a life of their own as instruments of religious renewal, and Acción Católica had become a major supporter of the Franco counterrevolution. In the 1950s the cursillos jumped to the old Spanish colonies of Latin America and the Philippines. They hit the United States in 1957, brought over by a pair of Spanish air cadets being trained by the U.S. Air Force in Waco, Texas.10
In the United States cursillismo affirmed a specifically Spanish-rooted Catholicism for Latinos, especially Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, who until then had not found a comfortable home within the institutional Church, dominated as it was by Irish Catholic clergy. Cursillo activists, both priests and laymen, brought Spanish liturgy, Latino folk music, and popular cultural traditions into regular church services. A form of Catholic Pentecostalism, it nevertheless always enjoyed a relationship of mutual support with church authorities. Like the Catholic Mass and other rituals, the cursillo itself is a highly structured experience where, according to one of the movement’s two most important leaders, Juan Hervas, “nothing is trusted to improvisation.” Similarly, the Cursillo Movement (the name has now been trademarked) is directed by a tightly structured organization, where absolute authority resides in a spiritual director appointed by the head of the local diocese. He in turn works through a local secretariat made up predominantly of laypeople.11
Cesar Chavez did his cursillo in the late 1950s or early ’60s, according to his brother Richard.12 Richard’s uncertainty about the date comes from the air of secrecy that surrounded the early cursillos, and from Chavez’s own subsequent reluctance to talk about his commitment to the movement. The cursillo is a four-day experience, which a person goes through only once. The initiate has to be invited by a veteran who has remained active in post-cursillo activities. Each potential participant also has to be approved by the regional secretariat. He must have been baptized, should be a stable adult between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-five, not be going through any emotional crisis, and be either an actual or a potential leader in the community. Although women can make a cursillo separate from men—but wives cannot go through the experience unless their husbands have done so first—the movement’s emphasis has always been on making Christianity a “manly” activity.
The four
