As a child in Arizona, I grew up hearing Cesar Chavez’s name. Schools, streets, plazas and parks are named after him in this state, and we learned about his movement in school. Chavez was born in Yuma, Ariz., and died not far from it in San Luis.
Years later, I visited the old United Farm Workers headquarters while reporting on the first Trump administration’s immigration crackdowns. In some ways, it felt like I was visiting a pilgrimage site. Chavez was Catholic, and beginning in the 1960s, Catholic leaders walked shoulder to shoulder with him in advocating for workers’ rights. In 1988 he fasted for 36 days to call attention to deadly toxins used in the fields of California.
“Do you think the church will ever recognize Cesar as a saint?” I asked a friend who had worked with the civil rights leader for a decade.
He grimaced. No, he said, he didn’t think so. But he was vague in his explanation. He talked about Chavez’s bad temper, but I sensed he left something unsaid.
Perhaps it was connected to what The New York Times reported this week. According to its investigation, Chavez sexually assaulted two underage girls, as well as Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers movement.
“Many of the women stayed silent for decades, both out of shame and for fear of tarnishing the image of a man who has become the face of the Latino civil rights movement, his image on school murals and his birthday a state holiday in California,” according to the Times report by Manny Fernandez and Sarah Hurtes. Ms. Huerta said she did not report Chavez, in part, because she feared no one would believe her.
A number of patterns surfaced by the lengthy report echo problematic institutional mechanisms that enabled a culture of abuse within the Catholic Church. Colt Anderson and I use a multidisciplinary approach to explore these problems and suggest solutions in our upcoming book Clericalism: The Institutional Dimension of the Catholic Sexual Abuse Crisis.
We relied in part on the insights of Douglass North, a Nobel Prize-winning economist. His analysis recognizes how both formal and informal rules shape social, political and economic behavior. Formal rules may be written down in church texts or human resources manuals. But informal rules, like unwritten traditions, customs and patrimonial relationships, are every bit as influential, if not more so.
These “rules of the game,” as North describes them, create incentives and disincentives for certain behaviors among members of organizations. In our study, which included individual and group interviews, we identified many of the same disincentives that were outlined by the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Those disincentives included fear of negative personal consequences, power differentials and other institutional factors that discourage reporting incidents of abuse.
We also found that, despite well-intentioned attempts at reform, the church still maintains many disincentives to reporting sexual abuse and other misbehavior. We spoke to people who work at parishes, schools, universities and national organizations. At every level, participants confirmed an unspoken pressure to either be silent about misconduct or to make public statements that cast the church in a positive light.
A culture that promotes silence and a lack of transparency often does so because of loyalty and a desire to protect an institution’s reputation. People we interviewed from Catholic high schools and universities affirmed the priority placed on reputation. They said a good reputation is, among other things, essential to maintain a strong donor base.
Our interview subjects said that priests disappear from their positions at parishes and other Catholic institutions without explanation in part so as to spare them embarrassment. But participants said church leaders show less concern about embarrassing lay employees, an attitude that reveals a vast power differential.
“At the diocesan level, from what I’ve seen, people are more apt to report misbehavior of other laypeople than they are of clergy—unless the misbehavior of clergy has escalated to a certain level,” one participant told us.
Similarly, disincentives discouraged people from reporting Chavez. Ms. Huerta said this week that she feared no one would believe her and that reporting Chavez would harm a movement to which she had given her life. Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas, the two women who say Chavez sexually assaulted them when they were minors, also found it difficult to come forward publicly. According to the Times, close friends and family “begged them not to, arguing that it could not be a worse time to attack a Latino hero.”
But organizations simply cannot claim to defend human dignity when they fail to recognize the dignity of their members. Institutional reputation must not be maintained at the cost of individual human dignity.
Individuals who do step forward, despite systemic disincentives, should be celebrated. It is through their courage that we know the truth. To flourish, institutions must tend to both formal and informal rules and create a culture that incentivizes accountability and transparency, including for beloved leaders. If we remain silent, we allow destructive behaviors to perpetuate and victims to multiply.
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