The People’s Priest

“Instead, in 1951, he signed up to become a parish priest in one of New York ’s poorest neighborhoods— Washington Heights , on the northern tip of Manhattan , then a barrio of fresh-off-the-airplane Puerto Rican immigrants. The classically educated bookworm turned out to be an effective and popular priest. The experience of tending to immigrant parishioners as they got flash-fried in urban modernity left a lasting impression of the grotesque inadequacy of large-scale, rationally administrated institutions in dealing with basic human needs.” Chase Madar on Ivan Illich’s legacy.