A prophet, a teacher, a realistic dreamer: priest and thinker Ivan Illich dies at 76; he founded influential Mexican center - Appreciation - Obituary

National Catholic Reporter, Dec 20, 2002 by Harvey Cox

"R-r-read me the last three sentences you have written." It was the summer of 1968, and the voice, slightly accented, with the trilled "r," issued from a tall figure in a brown and gray serape lying prone on the floor of my small study at the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Dutifully, I read for Ivan Illich, the founder and director of "CIDOC," the most recent scribblings on the book I was then writing. Then he responded. His comments, as usual, were apt and dazzling. He could conjure historical analogies out of the air, suggest alternative phrasing, pose probing questions.

Illich often sprang one of those unannounced descents on the various guests --maverick intellectuals, progressive priests--anyone whose ideas struck his fancy that he had invited to quaff the elixir of the center. He would enter stealthily through the open door, lie on the rough woven carpet, listen attentively to the "last three sentences," then comment. After a few minutes, he would dash out to stage another surprise visitation on someone else. Or the bell marking the morning break from the Spanish classes might ring, and he would join everyone for coffee and pastries under a clear blue sky on a stone patio scented with red bougainvillea, always blooming in a city whose residents boasted that it enjoyed 365 days a year of balmy summer weather.

When Illich, 76, died at his home in Bremen, Germany, Dec, 2, I remembered the frantic phone call I made to him in June 1968. He had already been at the center for a couple years, and had invited me twice to join his summer faculty. I had: never gone, but now I was ready. I had been working in the Robert Kennedy campaign, and when Bobby was killed in Los Angeles, I had wanted to take my family and get away, at least for a while. I called Illich, and he said, "Come." We did.

Ivan Illich was ordained to the Roman Catholic priesthood in Rome in 1952, and shortly thereafter came to New York. After falling out of favor with Cardinal Francis Spellman, who had originally admired his work as a priest among the Puerto Ricans in Washington Heights, he moved to Puerto Rico where he briefly served as vice rector of the Catholic University in Ponce until tensions with church authorities also arose there. Apparently his superiors all saw him as a brilliant, energetic, but erratic priest who would do just fine if only the right niche could be found. But Illich was never a man who could be placed in a niche. At his next stop in Cuernavaca, however, it appeared that Brer Rabbit had finally reached the briar patch.

But not as the superiors hoped. His original mandate at the Center for Intercultural Documentation was to prepare North America Catholic church workers to serve in Latin America. But he quickly came to believe that what the church south of the Rio Grande needed was not more priests and nuns, especially from North America, but more grassroots lay initiative. This made him one of the early champions of the base ecclesial communities. Fired by Illich's new vision, the center rapidly assumed a different profile. With the support of Don Sergio Mendez Arceo, the progressive bishop of Cuernavaca, the center, indeed the whole town, became a magnet for independent thinkers--students and teachers (and at the center the distinction was never clear) from all over North and South America. Bishop Mendes Arceo always seemed to be able to find an assignment for priests and nuns who had been expelled or suspended from Chile or Brazil or Nicaragua by church or state. The outdoor cafes around the lovely old piazza with its central gazebo and refreshment stands provided only one of the many venues reminiscent of the crackling atmosphere along the Boulevard St. Michel in Paris.

There was a decided buzz about Cuernavaca, especially among young countercultural types, during the late 1960s and early 1970s. They arrived in droves, with their backpacks, jeans and recently purchased serapes and sandals. They thronged the boarding houses and inexpensive hotels. Some wanted to learn Spanish, and the center had an excellent language school. Others just wanted to hang out. All wanted to warm themselves in the already legendary glow of Ivan Illich and the cluster of intellectual enfants terribles that surrounded him. But many soon became disillusioned.

Illich, whose ideas on education--spelled out in his 1971 book De-Schooling Society--were indeed revolutionary, had utterly no patience with academic slackness. He couldn't abide people who used language--any language--sloppily. He hated empty chatter. He was just as critical of hippy laxity as he was of the moralistic smugness and rigidity of his own church. The young people climbing off the rickety buses may have expected a merry prankster, but instead they found an old-world aristocrat with a hawk nose and piercing eyes who made stringent demands on them, and whose stinging critique of bureaucratic modernity arose from his love of tradition rather than from some Haight-Ashbury version of doing your own thing.