Ivan Illich had an eventful life. Born in 1926 in Vienna, as a child and young man he lived in Croatia, Florence and Salzburg before, determined to join the priesthood, he went to Rome to study philosophy and theology at the Gregorian University. Studious, smart, sophisticated and proficient in multiple European languages, he seemed destined to rise up the Catholic hierarchy. But instead he moved again, first to New York, then to Puerto Rico and (from 1961) to Cuernavaca, Mexico, all the while nominally working for the Church but continually clashing with its leadership. In 1969 he renounced the privileges of his priesthood and dedicated himself to the research institute he had founded, the Centro Intercultural de Documentación (Centre for Intercultural Documentation, CIDOC), and to writing a series of coruscating critiques of compulsory education (Deschooling Society, 1971), technological development (Tools for Conviviality, 1973) and the medical establishment (Medical Nemesis, 1974). From urbane European Catholic scholar to radical Latin American social critic, Illich's trajectory suggests a transformation in line with the rebellious spirit of the age. Indeed, if his work is still read now, it is as a curious remnant of an outdated 1960s counter-culture.

Todd Hartch, however, sets out to show the continuities in Illich's thinking, and its ongoing relevance today. The Prophet of Cuernavaca argues for ‘the underlying unity of Illich's life and thought’ (p. 11), even if this means that many of his arguments have to be read in terms of a rather curious ‘Illich Code’. And though Hartch is critical of some of his subject's most strongly-held positions, he ends up concluding that ‘Illich's message […] could serve as a powerful corrective to the hedonistic, superficial, and disengaged culture that dominates the developed world today’ (p. 170).

But this code, the supposed key to Illich's real intent, is revealed only late on, in Hartch's final chapter. The bulk of the book is devoted to Illich's battles with Church superiors and to the somewhat eccentric way in which he went about his work. For Illich was first sent to Cuernavaca in the name of a grand scheme to expand the Church's mission to Latin America. This vision touched the very highest echelons of the hierarchy: apparently Pope John XXIII's ‘dying words had been “Oh, the great work in Latin America”, repeated several times’ (p. 14). So, fresh from a stint training missionaries in the Spanish language and Latin American culture in Puerto Rico (though even here he had managed to rile the local bishop), the newly-minted Monsignor Illich was charged with establishing an ambitious programme that would prepare priests and lay workers for the great task ahead. The fly in the ointment, Hartch tells us, was that Illich himself was profoundly opposed to the notion that what the region needed was meddling from ‘development-obsessed do-gooders’ (p. 38). What he envisaged instead was ‘an anti-missionary training center designed to discourage would-be missionaries’ (p. 28). And in Hartch's telling of it, he went to almost any lengths to sabotage his superiors’ efforts. He certainly did his level best to put off potential trainees, and those who did make it to Mexico were treated in ways that sound rather like a cross between hazing (ragging) and outright bullying.

Even after Illich broke formally with the Church, and established the CIDOC, Hartch charges him with cavalier mistreatment of the new recruits who, drawn by Illich's increasing fame if not notoriety, came flocking to learn from the prophet of deschooling and radical critique. As one frustrated disciple put it, ‘the overriding reality of the institution was “the malaise” and “numbed feeling of disconnectedness” of its students’ (p. 119). Given the way in which Hartch repeats such criticisms, doing little to allay them, at times the book starts to feel more like a hatchet job than a serious engagement with Illich's own thought, which tends to take a back seat to the story of political and bureaucratic battles.

All becomes clear at the end, however, when Hartch finally reveals a very interesting reading of Illich's work, even in its supposedly secular phase, as driven by an impassioned critique of a Church that he fundamentally adored. This is the Illich Code. For ultimately, it is argued, behind Illich's denunciation of the various institutions – such as the school or the hospital – that (he asserts) plague modern society is a plea to return to the essential virtues of the pre-modern Church. In so far as teaching and instruction, labours of love incumbent on all of us, have been farmed out to professional educators and packaged as compulsory schooling for the young, and in so far as ‘hospitals [have] totally replaced hospitality’, the effect in each case is that ‘an institution excuse[s] Christians from the call to serve the stranger and the suffering’ (pp. 154–5). In short, the problem with missionaries was less their sense of mission than the notion that theirs was a specialised task devolved to a privileged few from the developed world. This is an abdication of the Church's message, rather than its fulfilment. And here, Illich believed he saw a centuries-old pattern. Everywhere he looked, he sensed that ‘the essential features of modernity were direct outgrowths of Christianity that had been distorted and disfigured into caricatures of Christian virtues and that accomplished the opposite of their original purposes’ (p. 154). Illich is railing against a denial of the Incarnation, against the dehumanising effects of institutionalisation as it depersonalises ways of being and forms of interaction that should be fundamentally embodied, a matter of flesh and blood rather than statistics and measurements.

Is this defence of Illich convincing? Not really, not least because ironically this book is throughout too much a history of Illich's institutions and too little an account of Illich the man and the thinker. Whenever Illich leaves those institutions – whether on his periodic retreats, or when the CIDOC is finally closed down, for instance – Hartch falls silent. Or maybe it would be better to say that Hartch's final championing of Illich as ‘perhaps the most trenchant theological critic of the West in the late twentieth century’ (p. 166) is itself somewhat prophetic, in that it comes from almost nowhere, like a voice from the desert that is the dry detailing of bureaucratic power games. As such, Hartch's book does not (yet) convince, but it provokes and inspires us to rediscover Illich's life and work, to seek to understand it in new ways.