"Get Going, and Don't Come Back"

From the reception room of the Vatican's Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a waiting monsignor led the visitor to a turn-of-the-century elevator. They rode down several floors, walked through rooms lined with musty, leather-bound volumes, entered yet another gloomy room. Across a heavy wooden table, decorated only with an austere black crucifix, sat a man in a black, violet-trimmed cassock. The visitor presented himself. "I am Illich."

"I know."

"Monsignor, who are you?"

"I am your judge."

Thus began, last June, the Vatican examination of Monsignor Ivan Illich, 42, Vienna-born New York priest, linguist and controversial founder of one of Latin America's most promising experiments in social and cultural education, the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico. What began as a quiet investigation has blown into a full-scale and still unresolved controversy in the past few weeks.

Cruel Realities. The confrontation was inevitable, if long in developing. Restlessly brilliant, Illich has an ironically orthodox background: he has a doctorate in history from Salzburg University, studied theology at Rome's centuries-old Capram'ca and philosophy at the Vatican's prestigious Gregorian University. By the time he was 31, he was vice-rector of Catholic University in Puerto Rico and a monsignor. But in 1960 he disagreed with the political intervention of Puerto Rico's Bishop James McManus when the bishop tried to forbid Catholics to vote for Governor Luis Munoz Marin, who favored experimental birth control centers. The late Francis Cardinal Spellman, to whose diocese Illich was permanently attached, eased Illich home.

He was not home long. Having raised money and the support of Fordham University, he set off to Cuernavaca to establish a training center for a new kind of missionary for priest-poor Latin America. The Illich missionaries--priests, nuns, laymen--were to become a sort of Catholic peace corps, awake to the ideas, the language, the culture and the cruel economic and social realities of the area. The center was to become, as one admiring Latin American archbishop would put it later, a place of "incarnation," where Yankees would be born again with Latin American hearts. Gradually, though, its focus became wider, moving away from a solely Catholic orientation and attracting college students and professors of all faiths, and even Protestant missionaries.

As the center flourished, Cuernavaca became a stopover for reformers of many political persuasions, from middle to far left. All--even the most radical--were invited to plunge into freewheeling discussions. That in itself was enough to make the center suspect to many conservatives. Then Illich himself spoke out. He complained in the Jesuit magazine America that most North American Catholic efforts in Latin America were thinly disguised colonialism. He suggested in the Catholic magazine The Critic that most future Latin American priests might best be working family men who would only exercise their priestly role part time.

The criticisms of U.S. Catholic programs in Latin America won Illich the enmity of Boston's Richard Cardinal Gushing, a chief sponsor of such aid programs. Illich's other ideas and the innovations at Cuernavaca provoked mutterings at the Vatican. Cardinal Spellman remained an ally; shortly before his death he flatly refused a request from the Mexican Bishops' Conference to recall Illich "until sustaining reasons are brought forth." But in Rome, Antonio Cardinal Samore, conservative president of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, issued continuing demands for an investigation of Illich and the center, until the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith--the descendant of the Roman Inquisition --agreed. The investigation ultimately brought Illich to Rome last June.

Subversive Interpretation. As Illich told it to New York Times Religion Editor Edward B. Fiske, the outcome in the musty Vatican basements was a standoff. He refused to take an oath of secrecy, refused to answer questions un til a list of charges had been presented to him. When the "charges" finally appeared, they turned out to be a list of 85 questions under such headings as "Weird Conceptions about the Clergy in the Church," and "Subversive Interpretation Concerning the Liturgy and Ecclesiastical Discipline." Sample question: "How do you respond to those who present you as petulant, adventurous, imprudent, fanatical and hypnotizing?" After receiving the questions, Illich wrote an eight-page letter to Franjo Cardinal Seper, the Congregation's prefect, explaining that he could not answer them. The form of the questions, he wrote, "seems designed to wreck any hope of a human and Christian dialogue between the one judging and the one being judged."

Grand Inquisitor. Though Illich's examination itself was inconclusive, the Congregation ultimately ruled against him. Three weeks ago, it issued an order that all Roman Catholic priests and members of religious orders were henceforth forbidden to study at the Cuernavaca center. Illich was not surprised. Even before his session at the Vatican, he had quietly asked for--and had received--temporary lay status from New York's Archbishop Terence Cooke. Thus he gave up the right to say Mass and perform other priestly functions but also adroitly deprived the Vatican of any effective power of suspension.

In New York last week, however, Illich sounded like a man regretfully more outside than in. He assailed the Sacred Congregation for violating the Pope's own orders for open hearings, and for "vague, ambiguous and irresponsible charges" that could only be made "because people throughout the world have been led to believe that whatever the Vatican says must be true." As for himself, he said, "I am giving up proving my orthodoxy to the Vatican. I have, now, no further desire to do so." Though loyal to basic church doctrine, and to the church's role as a caretaker of Western civilization, Illich is convinced that social reform in Latin America must come from outside the church. Consequently, he will remain at Cuernavaca --even though that means continuing in a lay status while observing the celibacy of a priest.

Some dismayed Catholics are hoping that the Vatican's order, not yet fully promulgated worldwide, might still be rescinded. That is doubtful, but there is at least a hint that the Illich affair was more than a little disturbing to Rome. Cardinal Seper's last words to him, Illich recalled with some amazement last week, were: "Get going, get going, and do not come back." They were, Illich noted, remarkably close to the last words spoken by the Grand Inquisitor to his prisoner, Jesus Christ, in the philosophical vignette from The Brothers Karamazov. In Dostoevsky's tale, Christ has returned to earth, and the Inquisitor decides to burn him because his ideas of freedom are too dangerous for the world. After receiving his sentence from the Inquisitor, Christ kisses him. The Grand Inquisitor, shaken, orders him out: "Go, and come no more--come not at all, never, never!"

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