03/18/2026
Here is a letter that I just posted to the parish:
Friends,
I want to share with you a difficult decision about one of the figures in our Dancing Saints icon: César Chávez.
For many years, we have honored Chávez for his organizing among farm workers, his public witness for dignity and labor justice, and his language of sacrifice, faith, and nonviolence. His movement helped migrant workers gain bargaining power and brought national attention to the suffering and courage of farm laborers.
At the same time, Chávez’s legacy has long been more complicated than many public commemorations allowed. Historians and former colleagues have described a pattern of intense personal control within the movement, serious internal conflict, and coercive practices, especially in the Synanon-influenced culture that took hold at La Paz in the later years of his leadership. These accounts do not erase the movement’s importance, but they do remind us that even before the latest reporting, his legacy was not simple or untroubled.
Now a far more painful reckoning is before us. Recent investigations have brought forward grave allegations that Chávez sexually abused women and girls, including minors. Dolores Huerta has publicly accused Chávez of r**e, and multiple women have come forward with accounts of abuse when they were young. These charges have already prompted institutions, including the United Farm Workers, to pause celebrations and reassess his legacy.
These are not vague rumors or marginal claims. They are serious allegations reported through major investigations. At the same time, they remain allegations, not adjudicated findings. Our task, then, is to tell the truth as carefully as we can: neither pretending we have learned nothing, nor claiming more than has yet been formally established.
Because of that, I believe we should revise Chávez’s Dancing Saints biography. Here is the language I propose:
Cesar Chavez
(1927–1993) The son of Mexican migrants to California, he devoted his life to organizing farm workers. His movement gave migrant workers bargaining power, restoring dignity to a poor and dispossessed population. A man of religious faith and commitment to nonviolence, he called others to costly struggle for justice. Yet recent investigations have brought forward grave charges of sexual abuse, including abuse of minors, forcing a painful reckoning with a legacy that calls us to honor the struggle for justice while refusing to turn away from the suffering of those harmed. (April 23)
I also believe we should consider adding a brief prefatory note to the booklet itself, explaining that some of the figures in our saint cycle are honored not as flawless exemplars but as complex witnesses whose lives include gifts, contradictions, failures, and sometimes harms that call forth discernment. That would help this revision sit more honestly alongside other difficult figures already represented there.
And this is where I think there is also an invitation for us as a community.
We have faced questions like this before. They have come up with John Muir, whose reverence for the natural world has inspired generations, and whose writings also include dismissive and harmful characterizations of Native Americans that reflect the violence and assumptions of his time. They have come up with Elizabeth I, especially around her role in the suffering and starvation of the Irish. Over the years, some have wondered whether they could remain part of a community that honors such figures as people through whom God worked.
So, this is not entirely new ground for us. But it is newly urgent.
This moment gives us an opportunity to do our own work: to learn more deeply about the lives of those we honor, to take seriously what is being revealed, and to ask again what we mean by saints. What are we doing when we place these figures on the walls? What kind of truth are we committed to telling? What kind of holiness are we willing to name?
At the very least, we will need to come to a shared understanding of how we speak about Chávez. But I hope we will go further than that.
For now, we can hold in abeyance the question of changing the images on our walls until we have done the necessary work of learning, discernment, and, where it is called for, reparation. We do not need to rush to resolve what deserves careful attention.
There may also be, in time, an opportunity for a broader act of listening. The courage it takes for survivors to speak—often after many years, often at great personal cost—calls for more than acknowledgment. It calls for attention. In a spirit of restorative justice, we might consider how we, as a community, could create space not only for study and reflection, but for hearing from those whose voices have too often been ignored. Perhaps that could take the form of a wider community conversation, one that reaches beyond our own parish.
This is painful. It may be especially painful for those who have long honored Chávez, for those whose lives are bound up with the struggles he helped lead, and for those who know, in their own bodies or histories, the cost of abuse and the difficulty of speaking about it. It is painful especially because Chávez’s public witness mattered, and still matters, to many, particularly farm workers and Latino communities whose dignity he helped defend in public life. But if we are to keep company with the saints truthfully, we must be willing to tell the truth not only about courage and sacrifice, but also about harm.
We do not honor justice by hiding suffering. We honor justice by refusing to look away.
Peace,
Paul
