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Illich's parish ministry provided the intellectual foundation for all his subsequent writings. As few are aware of this period of Illich's life, the essay by Joseph P. Fitzpatrick, SJ, "Ivan Illich as We Knew Him in the 1950s," is the real gem of this collection. When Illich arrived in New York in 1951, Fitzpatrick was teaching sociology at Fordham University in the Bronx. Having earned his doctorate in sociology from Harvard University, Fitzpatrick was among the first generation of Catholic priests who saw immersion in secular learning as essential to the task of making the Church relevant to the modern world. Illich, born into an Austrian family of minor nobility, came to the United States to pursue postdoctoral research at Princeton University. Though educated to the highest European standards in history and philosophy, Illich actually knew little of modern social theory; Fitzgerald modestly takes credit for introducing Illich to the works of Durkheim, Weber, and the other great writers of modern sociology.
Still, Illich and Fitzgerald found their most fruitful collaboration at the level of practice rather than theory. Illich accepted the assignment at Incarnation parish as a condition for receiving a sabbatical to study at Princeton. He arrived in America at the height of the Great Migration that saw over half a million Puerto Ricans emigrate to New York between 1946 and 1964. Traditionally an Irish American parish, Incarnation found itself a center for Puerto Rican Catholics. Illich quickly mastered Spanish in order to minister more effectively to his flock; he also spent summer vacations in Puerto Rico immersing himself in the peasant culture of the countryside. On one of his visits, Illich learned of Fitzgerald as the only other New York-based clergyman to go to Puerto Rico to study the cultural background of the immigrants. Back in New York, Illich and Fitzgerald struck up a friendship and began to collaborate on a variety of innovative pastoral projects.
At the heart of Illich's pastoral vision lay the conviction that ministering to the poor requires not so much service as presence. Illich sought not to help the poor, but to be poor. Being poor meant many things, from the biblical ideal of the poor in spirit to a more anthropologically informed notion of cultural poverty, or the abdication of one's cultural assumptions in order to immerse oneself in the life of the poor. Fitzgerald and Illich sought to embody this ministry of presence in their first collaborative outreach project, El Cuartito de Maria, or The Little House of Mary. Illich arranged for Incarnation to rent an apartment in one of the tenements heavily populated with Puerto Rican (potential) parishioners. Women from the parish volunteered to watch and play with children so that mothers could work or run errands, but the purpose of the project was neighborly rather than vocational. Illich insisted that establishing personal relationships with the immigrants was a more important ministry than any program of material or spiritual uplift.
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