Among major Catholic
figures of the last half of the 20th century, few or none
rival Ivan Illich for his raw intellectual brilliance and creativity,
his vast and eclectic erudition, his linguistic fluency (accent-free
in nine languages), his electrifying and provocative eccentricity,
his missionary spirituality of austerity and humility, his
breath-taking critique of modernity as technocracy/bureaucracy, and
his contempt for the proud, prosperous post-war American Church. He
is probably also the least appreciated and understood thinker of the
period. Todd Hartch does much to correct this in “The Prophet of
Cuernavaca: Ivan Illich and the Crisis of the West.”
As the title
suggests, he focuses on the Cuernavaca period of the 1960s when
Illich operated a fine language school and a radical think tank in
beautiful Cuernavaca, Mexico. Illich’s experience of the North
American and Latin American churches had convinced him that the
heralded crusade to flood the Southern hemisphere with priests and
missionaries was a crude form of cultural imperialism. Hartch sees
that Illich’s appreciation for the popular Catholicism of NYC
Puerto Ricans in the 1950s had awakened in him a deep sense of
mission as humility, poverty and kenosis: the one sent empties
himself of his own culture in order to welcome, humbly, Christ as
present in his new people and culture. Additionally, Illich had a
keen sense that the adult experience of learning a foreign
language...awkward, humbling, confusing...was already an emptying
that could prepare the missionary to humbly receive. Unfortunately,
Croatian warrior that he was, Illich could not be content to share
this spiritual vision but waged a fierce, no-holds-barred, initially
deceptive and finally successful war to stop the “invasion” of
Yankee missionaries. Hartch has done his homework well in covering,
in detail, this campaign including his ever-dramatic relationships
with the episcopacy, the Vatican, Maryknoll Father Considine, his
students at the school and his amazing network of talented thinkers
and leaders. For example, early in the course of the Vatican Council
he served as peritus to Cardinal Suenens, one of the very most
admired, influential and progressive of the Council Fathers. But he
left in disgust at the bishops’ reluctance to unambiguously condemn
nuclear arms. His position here is typical of his radical aversion
for the modernity of the West and much of the institutional Catholic
Church.
Hartch also sees,
however, that underlying Illich’s thought and life was a deep,
barely articulated, mystical love of the Church in a most ancient and
radical manner. For example, he willingly stripped himself of his
priestly faculties when he entered more deeply into his vocation as
polarizing critic and advocate because he realized that his
(prophetic?) call of witness and argument conflicted with the
priestly task, at the Eucharist, of being a source of unity. (This is
in strong contrast with the clericalism, especially on the left, of
priests and even conferences of bishops who abuse holy orders by
using it to sanctify policy positions.) He also maintained throughout
his life his loyalty to celibacy and the Liturgy of the Hours.
His conflicted,
ambivalent relationship with the Church is perhaps best seen in his
inquisition in the Vatican in the Spring of 1968. (Roughly when this
reader studied Spanish at his Cuernavaca Institute and fell under his
influences as a young, Maryknoll College seminarian.) Illich is
summoned to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Church about
vague charges of polytheism. He is warmly greeted by the head of the
Congregation, fellow Croatian Cardinal Seper whom Illich later
described as “very kind, very correct, most humane, rather
apologetic ...acting like a man obliged to proceed in a transaction
that embarrassed him profoundly.” They chat comfortably in their
mother language. The mood changes abruptly: he is led down a hall to
an underground room to meet a man in a dark cassock who only
reluctantly gives his name and asks for a secrecy oath from the
accused. Illich refuses the oath and asks for the questions in
writing. The priest is finally directed by Seper to provide the
questions in writing. The questions are an insult and include: “What
do you have to do with the kidnapping of the Archbishop of Guatemala?
Do you want to exclude the rich from the Church? What do you think of
heaven and hell and also of limbo?” Illich delivers a letter, in
which he refuses to answer the questions, to Seper who embraces him
and says, most unexpectedly: “Get going, get going, and never come
back.” These words, it happens, are the very words of Dostoevsky’s
Grand Inquisitor as he sent Christ away. It is hardly possible that
the Serbian prelate chose these words by coincidence. But lest we
prematurely canonize Illich, Hartch notes that the lead up to the
investigation was inflamed by a story of Illich telling a bishop, on
a plane ride, that he practiced Afro-Caribean polytheism. This charge
was, of course, ludicrous. But Illich, who enjoyed prank-type
provocation and shock, may well have contributed to the furor by his
intellectual antics.
In the end, Hartch
makes the case that Illich was successful in his effort to stop the
flow of missionaries. My impression was different: he was, for a
time, provocative and (in)famous, but widely dismissed as an
extremist and a crank and less influential that he should have been.
The failure of the North American mission to the South was due more
to the broader societal dynamics of the 1960s than to the efforts of
this single, brilliant eccentric. Nevertheless, Hartch is a fine
start to a retrieval of Illich. His work awoke, in this reader, a
hunger for three more Illich books. First, we need a far more
thorough treatment of his understanding of the crisis of the West
(the subtitle of the work). Hartch focuses more narrowly on his
ecclesial concerns and tends to see the later, broader, secular
developments (about de-schooling society, medical nemesis, etc.) as
outflows from these. But his broader cultural views may in the longer
run be far more significant than the inner-Church fueds. His thought,
hopefully, will be brought into conversation with similar culture
critics like Ellul, Schumacher, Berry, as well as Schindler and the
Communio School of the John Paul II Institute in DC. Secondly, we
learn very little about the person of Illich: He remains an enigma!
What about his early family life? His best friends? His loves? Why
did he change his name from John to Ivan? Indeed, he remains a cold,
detached figure: capable of befriending a wide range of talented,
influential people but seemingly intellectual and distant if not
manipulative. He was a close and trusted colleague of Fr. Considine
even as he was quietly undermining that priest’s life work! “With
friends like this, who needs enemies” the good Maryknoller must
have wondered in hindsight. Nor do we learn from Hartch anything
about his later years when he died of cancer and apparently refused
medical aid in accord with his views. Lastly, Hartch hints at but
does not fully develop his underlying spirituality: his mysterious
call to the priesthood, his enchantment with St. Thomas under the
tutelage of Jacques Maritain, his 40 days in the Sahara in the spirit
of Charles de Focault, and his pilgrimage across Latin America. His
was an ancient, deep vision that has not yet been articulated.
Illich has been
largely disregarded as utopian and unrealistic. But I for one recall,
with gratitude, the influence he had on me a half century ago. As a
religion teacher in Catholic high schools I remained aware of the
contradiction, or at least the tension, between the coercive nature
of schooling and the glorious freedom of the Gospel...and I did my
best to lean into the later. For 25 years I made a good living for my
family in UPS as a loyal, enthusiastic supervisor but I retained a
sense of the impersonal, mechanical pressures of that environment
that granted me a degree of internal freedom. More recently I have
been blessed by involvement with a modest residence for low-income
women...a far more “convivial” and “Illichian” engagement.
Our Church and our
entire culture will greatly benefit from a deeper encounter with the
spirit of this profound, brilliant, elusive mystic! Todd Hartch has
made a fine contribution.
No comments:
Post a Comment