By Lee Hoinacki
Published December 2003
In 1960, I met lvan Illich in Puerto Rico, where he directed an institute designed principally for US Catholics – laypersons, religious and clergy – who worked with Spanish speaking people. Born in Vienna and ordained in Rome, he refused to follow the urging of Cardinal Montini (later, Pope Paul VI) to prepare for the Vatican bureaucracy, and chose to come to America.
After a walking and riding journey throughout Latin America he founded a new kind of institution that would teach excellent Spanish to foreigners, help to coordinate the work of Latin American bishops, theologians and pastoral workers engaged in research on the Church in Latin America, and publish its result, and bring together people who evidenced a markedly evangelical approach as witnesses of the Good News.
Late in 1961, with Cardinal Spellman’s support, Ivan Illich opened his center in an old rented hotel in Cuernavaca, Mexico. I remember many conversations there with him and the Iocal bishop, Sergio Mendez Arceo, a close friend up to his death in l992.
With important help from Dom Helder Camara, Ivan Illich established a companion center in Petropolis, Brazil. The two institutions were organized to challenge and prepare North Americans and Europeans who wanted to live and work in Latin America. They immediately became highly controversial with bureaucrats in the Catholic Church and the CIA. When Cardinal Spellman die in 1967, Ivan’s enemies in these two institutions conspired to trap him.
After a complicated series of moves and countermoves, Ivan made a statement that he would no longer act publicly as a priest, but continue to observe his priestly obligations. For example, during the last fifteen years, he and I recited some of the Divine Office each day, using breviaries that contained the Latin Vulgate that was most familiar to us.
In 1976, CIDOC in Cuernavaca closed. It had become a mixture of language school, alterative university, think tank, and publishing center, and a place where Ivan received his friends. The publication of Deschooling Society in 1971 marked the fact that he had abandoned his explicitly theological approach with groups of priests and religious in various talks and essays. In his subsequent books and articles, and lectures in different US and European universities, he developed his own style of expressing himself in the tradition of apophatic theology. For example, one can read Deschooling Society. Medical Nemesis (1976), Gender (1982), In the Vineyard of the Text (1993), and other writings as radical probings into fundamental theological issues posed specifically by modernity. With the possible exception of Jacques Ellul, no contemporary thinker has confronted the impact of the Gospels on modernity’s child, technology, with such power and penetration, detail and inclusiveness.
After closing CIDOC, Ivan lived at a Hindu temple in India for a time, and traveled throughout Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. ln 1978, he gratefully accepted the hospitality of friends in Europe, the US and Mexico, living, writing and/or teaching a part of each year in these three places.
He believed strongly in the wonder of surprise, which I sometimes found disconcerting. For example, once, while lecturing, he asked me how it was going. I answered, “No one understands a word. You have to give them some idea of where you’re coming from.”
When we reconvened, Ivan stood up and in his most dramatic posture said: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth….” and proceeded with the Creed. The audience, composed of Baltimore- Washington Beltway secular professionals, was dumbfounded. So was I!
Another time, after a lunch, I told Ivan I was still thinking about what he had said concerning the education of ministers (priests) of the Gospel. “Me, too,” he said, and handed me some pages he had written during the night, a remarkable document that beautifully complemented an earlier essay, “The Vanishing Clergyman.”
A year or two ago, I complained about his lectures at the University of Bremen. “Speak out more explicitly, no one has a clue to what you’re saying,” I charged, referring to his apophatic mode of presentation. He quietly answered, “those who have ears to hear will hear.”
Ivan worked out a critique of the technological, systemic, bureaucratic, committed to growth and progress, disembedded thrust of modernity. As he saw so well, massive indoctrination affects us all, inculcating expectations to be fulfilled through packages, preferably delivered by institutions. In my estimation, his judgement is devasting. True, I was a dear friend, not a disinterested observer, but any literate person can test my opinion through a careful and slow reading of his texts.
In the final years of his life, Ivan reached for a perspective far beyond the conventional sense of his books, searching for the words to express both his faith in the Incarnation and his dismay at the ‘modern’ gutting of the possibility of faith in its truth. One can detect this attempt in three published pieces: his speech, “The Cultivation of Conspiracy”, Barbara Duden’s essay, The Quest for Past Somatics” (in The Challenges of Ivan Illich, Hoinacki and Mitcham, eds.), and the CBC interview, “The Corruption of Christianity.” This last text is flawed, evidencing the mounting pain endured by Ivan Illich in his last years. David Cayley is now working on the transcripts to bring out a more faithful document.)
Refusing allopathic medical attention for the expanding tumor on the side of his face, Ivan chose to live in Suffering. He had strongly criticized the medical system in Medical Nemesis and subsequent writings. But he was even more concerned about the insatiable desire of people for a medical “fix.” He came to believe that the principal pathogen of our time is the grossly exaggerated “pursuit of health.” In his life and death I see a lovely threefold congruence: his life reflected his writings, and his faith gave us a testimony to both.
On December 2, 2002, with a young student, he discussed a seminar he had organized for the following weekend. After the student left he lay down on a futon in the living room of his “home” in Bremen. Some minutes later a friend found him dead.
A crowd of people almost filled the large Church of St Johann for the funeral. The historical record reveals that the death of Church faithful is sometimes accompanied by unusual events. I witnessed three such happenings, actions for which my notion of causality could not account. They were similar to the mode of lvan Illich’s rhetoric perhaps ambiguous, movements perhaps discernable only to someone who has eyes to see, that is, to someone whose eyes have been opened.
