Ivan Illich, Catholic Theologian (PART II) Illich and Catholic Social Teaching
In a previous essay in these pages,1 I argued that for Ivan Illich the modern world is at its heart the doxological betrayal of Catholicism, an idolatrous technocratic liturgy prohibiting the true cultus from which it is ultimately derived. Like all cults, modern tools seek to subsume all of life into their rites, and yet, perhaps as never before, these rites mask their character as foreign with a new set of fundamental certainties feigning Christian truth. So the trusting, hopeful, fleshy, useless eucharistic liturgy is replaced by various systems expected to deliver a terrestrial salvation in the cathedrals of medicine, education, transport, and cybernetics. The Church's irreducible personalism the contingent particularity of embodied existence in space and time is abstracted into possibilities and risk management and explained by behaviorism as the way things have to be. Persons become manipulatable concepts. The body becomes a chartable system in need of upkeep, its once salutary suffering first taxonomized and then reduced to a minimum. The pursuit of truth is separated from a tradition bound way of life and replaced with bare, un situated nominalist "information," and a moral order reducible to the play of power. In this world, subsistence work or gendered practice dissolves under economic analysis into interchangeable units of "activity" always vulnerable to being unmasked as inequitable instances of the will to power and the violation of rights. This, for Illich, is the corruption of the best, which is the worst.