KANSAS CITY (MO)
Kansas City Substack [Kansas City, MO]
March 23, 2026
By Melinda Henneberger
But from César Chávez to Joe Paterno to ‘living saint’ Jean Vanier, it just keeps happening.
Given the depth of the pain that those who revered César Chávez have felt since last week’s report that he sexually assaulted very young girls and raped his United Farm Worker cofounder, Dolores Huerta, it’s astounding to me, in a good way, that Kansas City’s Hispanic community immediately came out in full support of the victims.
Then, they put out a statement saying they would go through a process in which all voices would be heard on what to do about his name and his likeness – on Avenida César Chávez and a mural there. That feels respectful both to the victims and to the grief over learning about them.
I have covered abuse in a lot of forms over many years and have not once before seen a swift reaction like this: “We cannot change the past, but we have the power to build a future rooted in accountability and community.”
Please see original article for statement of community solidarity.
Last Wednesday, I said in an initial piece about Huerta that a lot of unflattering information about Chávez – not about sexual abuse, but about his mistreatment of the undocumented workers he tried to get deported and worse, and the cult of personality he tried to build around himself later in life – had been known for some time.
And that’s true, if you read or read about Pulitzer winner Miriam Pawel’s remarkable 2014 book, The Crusades of César Chávez. According to her book, Jack Anderson began a 1980 column this way: “It saddens me to have to report that the United Farm Workers (UFW) union, which lifted so many stoop laborers out of peonage and degradation, has become a violence-prone, tyrannical empire under the iron-fisted rule of César Chávez.” Anderson recanted, Pawel wrote, after the UFW threatened a libel suit and the California Migrant Ministry director Chris Hartmire compared Chávez to Jesus, St. Francis and Gandhi.
But here, according to Pawel’s book, is how Chávez treated members of a rival union in Arizona: “UFW organizers threatened to have Arizona union members deported if they did not join the UFW.” The group’s leader “was accused of being a Communist. A clothing bank operated by his group was torched shortly after UFW officials charged the clothes were distributed only to illegal immigrants.” Chávez also got the bishop in Phoenix to pull a grant to the group.
That does not mean, though, that “everybody knew,” or that this blow isn’t fresh.
When the disgraced and now deceased Catholic cardinal Ted McCarrick was revealed as a sexual predator, lots of people said “everybody knew.” And many did.
But though I mistakenly believed I was pretty well acquainted with McCarrick, “everybody” did not include me, and I found the news of his crimes so hard to bear that I left the church for a time, disgusted by him and the keepers of his secrets.
Since the news about Chávez, I’ve been thinking yet again about how reflexively institutions protect their brand instead of their people – in ways that ultimately undermine the very work that they think they’re wrapping in cotton.
The ‘living saint’ whose abuse went on from 1952 until just before his 2019 death
Jean Vanier, long considered a “living saint” who’d founded the l’Arche communities in France and around the world for people with intellectual disabilities, was after his death in 2019 revealed to be not only someone who was an abuser, but who had created l’Arche as a “screen” in the first place.
The goal was to reassemble a “secret sect” banned by the church. They believed that Jesus and Mary had a kind of sacred, incestuous sexual relationship that specially chosen men could share as a “gift” with select women. He shared and he shared, and left many victims, all of them in France, quite devastated. None of those, an extremely frank, almost 900-page report on a two-year investigation found, were people with disabilities.
Some church officials, however, knew that Vanier was still defending Dominican Fr. Thomas Philippe, the spiritual mentor who had passed this wild heresy onto him. This is why Vanier was never ordained, though he tried for many years to be, and considered himself persecuted because the priesthood was denied him. Yet did Philippe’s former superiors keep track of his band of reprobates, or make public why he could no longer serve as a priest? You know they did not.
L’Arche communities did and do a world of good despite Vanier’s actions. But so much pain could also have been prevented with some oversight. Those who doubt the truth of abuse often disparage posthumous claims, but that’s when the power is gone and the danger has passed.
If Paterno had been told, ‘wouldn’t he have called 911?’
Of course there’s no shortage of secular examples. When I was covering the trial of 2012 trial of former Penn State defensive football coach Jerry Sandusky for the Washington Post, I wrote that, “There is so much local pressure to hold Penn State blameless, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the vice chairman of the school’s board of trustees apologized this week for even suggesting, in an interview with the Associated Press, that school officials might have been involved in a coverup.” It’s telling the truth that necessitates apologies.
If heroic head coach Joe Paterno really had been told Sandusky had been caught sexually assaulting a 10-year-old in the locker room, Sandusky’s defense attorney argued in court, “wouldn’t he have called 911?’’ In the courtroom, that played well. Defense counsel’s pitch was that it was too much of a stretch to believe that five top Penn State officials heard everything he’d been accused of and looked away.
In the end, Sandusky was convicted of 45 counts of child sex abuse, and was given a life sentence. Or maybe that’s not the end: In October, his legal team announced he was appealing on the basis of new evidence that prosecutors improperly coached two victims.
Wouldn’t it have been better in any case for the school to have listened to the whistleblowers from the beginning? Now they’d surely say yes, but is that what the next Penn State or UFW will do?
The union may not have known about Chávez’s sexual misconduct but has not been forthright about his history with undocumented workers. And the church, too, continued to wave the flag for Chávez long after many of his Catholic champions should have known better.
Every single time, protecting the myth from sunlight only ends in more harm — not only to the direct victims, but to those who believed, and to the work that the myth-tenders think they are guarding. For that matter, it’s not even good for the lionized: After a six-day course in mind control, Chávez believed he could heal people.
‘I went along with a lot of rotten stuff’
After Chávez fired even Hartmire, who had once compared him to Jesus, St. Francis and Gandhi, the man who succeeded Hartmire, Richard Cook, who had worked for the union for years, wrote this to his friend, again according to Pawel:
“César is just too complex. The little bastard is a genius but a destructive one. I expect he will eventually cut down everything and everyone until only he and Dolores are left. Right back where they began.”
And Hartmire wrote this in his journal:
“In a way, I got what was coming to me. I went along with a lot of rotten stuff. I not only went along, I interpreted these events so that César would be protected. I rationalized and excused many things he did for the sake of la causa.”
That’s where we go wrong, in excusing and rationalizing. I’m sure you remember how Obama used to say, quoting Alice Walker, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” I hear some of you groaning. But in the end, it’s really got to be everyday us, realizing that heroes are human, and refusing to go along with rotten stuff.