Cesar Chavez to social justice teachings
Before Cesar Chavez became a community organizer and more than a decade before the United Farm Workers was founded, “my education started when I met Father Donald McDonnell, who came to [the impoverished East San Jose barrio of] Sal Si Puedes [or “Get Out If You Can”] because there was no Catholic church there, no priest, and hundreds of Mexican Americans. We were some of the first members who joined his congregation for masses in a Puerto Rican hall that was just a broken-down little shack.” It later became Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church on East San Antonio Street. (From Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa, by Jacques Levy, W.W. Norton & Co., 1975, P. 89.)
Father McDonnell, 88, passed away on Feb. 20, 2012, in Hayward, after living in retirement in Oakland. UFW Secretary-Treasurer Sergio Guzman and a delegation of farm workers are attending the services for Father McDonnell Saturday in San Francisco. For more about Father McDonnell, see this statement from the California Catholic Conference:
http://www.cacatholic.org/index.php/about/bishops-of-california/331-rest-in-peace-rev-donald-charles-mcdonnell
“My father often spoke about how much Father McDonnell influenced him before he became an organizer with the Community Service Organization in 1952, and long before he started building the United Farm Workers in 1962,” said Paul F. Chavez, Cesar Chavez’s middle son and president of the Cesar Chavez Foundation. “My dad and Father McDonnell were both in their early- to mid-20s, and they became close friends. ‘I learned quite a bit from him,” my dad said, and it led to a lot of things.”
“Cesar Chavez tried to live the gospels and the social teachings of his Catholic faith every day, but his career dedicated to service to others all began with the lessons he learned early in life from his parish priest in East San Jose, Father McDonnell,” said Arturo S. Rodriguez, Chavez’s successor as president of the UFW. “Father McDonnell embodied those Catholic teachings and he profoundly impacted Cesar and so many others.”
At first, Chavez did chores to assist the priest—carpentry work, cleaning and painting. He drove Father McDonnell to perform mass at nearby camps for imported bracero farm laborers and for prisoners at the county jail. In turn, Father McDonnell introduced Chavez to the social justice teachings of the Catholic Church and to works on spirituality and human rights, including the writings of St. Francis of Assisi and M.K. Gandhi, biographies of labor leaders Eugene Debs and John L. Lewis, and classics of political philosophy by Machiavelli and de Tocqueville. It started out with “long talks about farm workers,” Chavez recalled. “I knew a lot about the work, but I didn’t know anything about economics, and I learned quite a bit from him. He had a picture of a worker’s shanty and a picture of a grower’s mansion; a picture of a labor camp and a picture of a high-priced building in San Francisco owned by the same grower. When things were pointed out to me, I began to see. Later I went with him a couple of times [from San Jose] to some [farm worker] strikes near Tracy and Stockton.”
“And then we did a lot of reading,” starting with Papal Encyclicals such as Rerum Novarum (Latin for Of New Things) by Pope Leo XIII in 1891, on the right of workers to organize, “and having the case for attaining social justice explained” by the priest. A biography of St. Francis Father McDonnell had Chavez read mentioned “Gandhi and others who practiced nonviolence,” the farm labor leader recalled. “That was a theme that struck a very responsive chord, probably because of the foundation laid by my mother. So the next thing I read after St. Francis was the Louis Fischer biography of Gandhi,” which is still in his carefully preserved office/library at the National Chavez Center at La Paz in Keene, Calif.
Father McDonnell asked to be relieved of parish duties and serve, along with a handful of other priests, as “priests to the poor” in what became known as the Spanish Mission Band throughout the 13-county Northern California Catholic Diocese, aiding farm workers and other poor Spanish-speaking Catholics. Father McDonnell’s base was Sal Si Puedes in East San Jose.
His nephews, Steve and James McDonnell, survive Father McDonnell. Services are scheduled as follows:
Vigil on Friday, February 24, 2012, 7:30 p.m.
Saint Margaret Mary Church
1219 Excelsior Avenue
Oakland, Calif.
Funeral Mass on Saturday, February 25, 2012, 11:30 a.m.
Saint Mary’s Cathedral
1111 Gough Street
San Francisco, Calif.