An Invitation to Ivan Illich

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The story of the pilgrimage is also about discipline, suffering, and ?walking the walk.? Granted, these are odd concepts today. In the age of quick fixes, self-help, and instant gratification, even the word pilgrimage sounds quaint, anachronistic. Why tramp a thousand k?s when you can drive to the music store and buy Chant by some Benedictine monks and have a religious experience in your living room? Both Hoinacki and Illich would consider this question absurd.

The story also offers the briefest glimpse of Illich?s strong but complicated religious faith. Though Illich remains a devout Catholic, his bond with the church has almost always been strained. This tension, which culminated in 1968 when Illich was called on the world?s biggest carpet, the Vatican?s, had been in the making almost from the day of his ordination in 1951.

Illich?s work with Puerto Ricans in Spanish Harlem between 1951 and 1956 led him to criticize the American church, which he said was imposing its values on minority groups. Later, as vice rector of the Catholic University in Ponce, Puerto Rico, Illich took aim at the educational system he was charged with running.

But it was as founder and director of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Mexico that Illich really started ringing alarm bells in Rome. An intensive language school and training center for U.S. priests, nuns, and brothers on their way to Latin America, the center, known by its Spanish acronym, CIDOC, was also the meeting ground for the dissident intellectuals and lay religious workers, who were encouraged by Illich to question the founding assumptions of volunteer programs for the Peace Corps to Catholic missions. Described as a think tank for radicals, CIDOC ran counter to everything the politically conservative church held sacred. After several years of ?success,? Illich was summoned to Rome.

Illich refused to defend himself ? inside or outside the Vatican. Within the year he had resigned as an ?employee? of the church-as-institution ? as what he has called an ?It.? But he has never stopped viewing himself as a humble servant of the church as ?She,? a familiar and beloved place of beauty, truth, awareness, and mystery.

Finally, and perhaps fundamentally, the story of those simple shoes is one of friendship. Illich is deeply, irrevocably committed to his friends. He will do everything he can for them ? give love, guidance, comfort, and a sense of community ? but he cannot and will not help them avoid life, which for him is not separate from pain and suffering. The shoes helped Hoinacki make the journey but did not insulate him from either the elements or his own inner torments.

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