The prophet of Cuernavaca focuses on the period beginning in 1961 and closing in 1976. The Center for Intercultural Formation (CIF) was founded at Fordham University, New York, in 1960 and began operations in Cuernavaca under Ivan Illich in 1961, at the Centre of Cultural Research (CIC), a missionary training centre, which remained a residence for prospective missionaries until 1966. In 1976 Illich closed the Centre for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC), which he had created as part of a programme of publishing and seminars. In his first chapter Todd Hartch introduces the reader to Illich's life at around 1951, when he came to the US to do his doctorate but instead became involved with a large Puerto Rican parish in New York City. The book, which consists of nine chapters and a conclusion, emphasises Illich's position on sending large numbers of North American missioners to Latin America, and his understanding of mission. At the core of Hartch's argument is the relationship between Illich and John Considine (director of the Latin American Bureau of the Catholic Welfare Conference, and architect of the papal missionary plans). Hartch argues that Illich put into action, from the start, an anti-missionary plot. Hartch's book opens a much needed scholarly debate on the life and work of Ivan Illich, and we approached it with positive anticipation. We had realised, particularly after the presentation of one of our papers at the American Catholic Historical Association in January 2014, attended by Hartch, that we have been working on Illich in parallel for a number of years.

We would agree with Hartch's interpretation of the period between 1961 and 1967 as the ‘Catholic’ period, and the one between 1967 and 1976, a time when Illich published some of his best known works, such as Deschooling society, as the ‘secular’ period. Hartch observes, however, as we also did, an ‘underlying unity’ in ‘Illich's life and thought’ (p. 11). We agree also with his notion that Illich moved to an apophatic way of examining issues in the second period. However, we disagree with interpretations that are central to the objective of the book: the clarification of the relation between the two periods, and Illich's thinking on mission. Hartch's framing of Illich's critique of missionary planning as a disagreement with John Considine is reductionist. The eventual conflict with Considine was only one component of Illich's critical stand on the institutionalised Church. The development of his thought in the 1960s and early 1970s needs to be placed in relation to the major debate that was taking place in Latin America and beyond, Cuernavaca being a focal point.

The lens employed by Hartch – developments in the American Church and the differences between Illich and Considine – lacks analysis of the Latin America context. Hartch appears not to have consulted primary sources deposited in El Colegio de Mexico (Daniel Cosío Villegas Library). This significantly limits his understanding of Illich's thinking and its radicalisation, something that Hartch does not acknowledge. That process cannot be understood without considering Illich's relationship with Bishop Méndez Arceo, the social psychoanalyst Eric Fromm, and Gregorio Lermercier in Cuernavaca, as well as the effect of a kind of social, cultural, religious aggiornamento, which included the arts, psychology, psychoanalysis and the social sciences, that Cuernavaca had begun to go through before Vatican II. This analytical defect often leads to interpreting Illich's intentions and actions as simply provocative, aimed at generating public controversy. Hartch's framing of Illich's critique of missionary planning as a disagreement with Considine also prevents him from illuminating with clarity Illich's initial position regarding missionary formation in Cuernavaca. Hartch works with the assumption that Illich always had an anti-missionary plan (p. 45), and that right from the beginning ‘Illich was sabotaging the Catholic missionary initiative’ (p. 163). He neglects to consider the distinction made by Illich from very early on between the Church as It, a self-serving worldly power, and the Church as She, the repository of tradition and the living embodiment of the Christian community, the mystery of faith. Furthermore, Hartch does not articulate well Illich's early and profound distrust of modernity and modernisation, and his critique of missionaries as agents of programmes of modernisation and as working with a political agenda. Illich's tour to Latin American countries, from Chile to Venezuela, in 1960, provided him, pace Hartch, with practical insights to his vision of mission, understood as a call, a vocation. Illich was not against missions, but had an understanding of mission quite different from that expounded by the American Church hierarchy and the Holy See and its politics.

It is also important to situate Illich and the CIF Reports in relation to the politics of the Church at the time – in particular the American Church represented by the Church in the US, and the dissenting voices of Latin American bishops, clearly expressed as early as 1959. The 1960s were a historical crossroads where the Cuban Revolution, the US response to a modernisation project operated through Alliance for Progress, John xxiii's call for a renewed mission in Latin America, Vatican II (1962–5), and the document from Medellin (1968) converged. It is not enough to explain the development of Illich's notion of missioner by appeal to his neo-Thomist position. It is also necessary to trace it within the political and discursive context of the 1950s and 1960s in Latin America, the active engagement of Cuernavaca and Illich's centres in ebullient emerging ideas linked to Latin American social and political praxis, and his inclination to go back to the source, the Gospel.

On a different note, the book exhibits a great deal of confusion regarding the use of political terms and the meaning that that they had in Latin America at the time. Nevertheless, this is a well-written and documented book that represents an important scholarly landmark and opens up serious scholarly discussion on Ivan Illich.