December 2014 Philadelphia Chapter of Pax Christi U.S.A.
Remembering Lee Hoinacki
[Phil Berryman’s reflection at Lee’s memorial service 10.25.14]
When I first met Lee Hoinacki on a 1967 visit to Cuernavaca his name was still Ceslaus, the name he had taken as a Dominican. He was Ivan Illich’s assistant in Cuernacava at CIDOC, a language and cultural training center. I visited him again in Los Angeles the early 1970s, when he was getting his PhD, and his wife Mary was very pregnant. Over the years I occasionally heard about him through mutual friends, but we didn’t meet again until the mid-1990s when Illich began to spend the fall semester at State College and here in Philadelphia. It was no accident that Ivan and Lee found St. Malachy a congenial place to stay, given their Christian anarchism, and that Lee at a certain point found it a congenial place to take up residence.
Although my acquaintance with Lee goes back almost a half century, I wouldn’t say I knew him well. We might mention mutual friends, but we didn’t reminisce about the old days. He struck me as a rather private person. Yet our lives took roughly parallel courses: we were both marked by our years in Latin America during a tumultuous time, returned in the 1970s to follow other pursuits, and had families. And we experienced a world that kept changing vertiginously. Lee has told his own story of his disenchantment with academia and his efforts at subsistence farming and raising a family in southern Illinois in Stumbling Toward Justice.
Both of us had to contend with Ivan Illich, Lee obviously much more than I. Illich was a strong personality, from the aristocracy of Croatia, who pursued his own path to the Catholic priesthood, soon heading a Catholic university in Puerto Rico, and then founding CIDOC, which began as a place for Spanish and cultural training for church personnel from North America and Europe on their way to be missionaries in response to papal calls for volunteers, but evolved into being a think tank and gathering place for Latin American intellectuals and radicals. In his writings, Illich began puncturing the assumptions of missionaries from rich countries presuming that they had much to offer the Latin American Catholic church. In articles and books he critiqued the institutional Catholic church, then foreign aid and “development”, then the whole enterprise of schools, and then medicine. By the mid-1970s his critique seemed to envision a low-tech “small-is-beautiful” world, in tune with an anarchist vision. However, after around 1980 his work became primarily historical as he was looking for the roots of the entire modern Western world.
I cite all of this because Lee was a crucial dialogue partner helping Illich refine his thought and particularly to put it into English. After the 1960s they went their separate ways, but then Lee returned to work directly with Illich for the decade of the 1990s. They divided the year between Cuernavaca, Pennsylvania and Bremen, and they continued to work together, after Lee took up residence at St. Malachy’s. Characteristic of his simplicity, Lee typically traveled to Cuernavaca by bus rather than fly.
Throughout his life Lee pursued the life of the mind to which he was introduced as a Dominican but he did so outside the academic setting with little concern about whether his work was published or where. He was also a consistent Christian anarchist. The term itself may be difficult to pin down, but what anarchists have in common is their mistrust in government and large systems; they don’t believe that the pursuit of justice requires that one’s party take state power, but rather that the time to practice justice and charity is now. And hence Lee’s weekly silent vigil in protest over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His participation at daily mass and role in the liturgy, reading the intercessions at the offertory, was consistent with the inner life of prayer that he began while young.
In Camino: Walking to Santiago de Campostela, Lee provides a first-person account of his 1993 month-long pilgrimage across Spain to the medieval shrine. In re-examining it I’m struck by how matter-of-fact it is, primarily a story of getting up each day, walking along trails or by fields, dealing with hostile dogs, occasional encounters with other pilgrims, getting his clothes dried by the fire after a day of rain, the kindness of people in the hostels. He occasionally mentions praying with his father’s rosary, or vespers with some monks, but does not present great spiritual breakthroughs. From time to time he ponders what is lost with the pace of modern life or questions what purpose is served by public buildings or churches, mentioning or citing Thoreau, Ellul, Polanyi, Wittegenstein, Merton, Keats, Wordsworth, or the Rule of St. Benedict. It is the Lee we knew, dealing with mundane tasks while communing with the minds of the past, and it is a reminder that we are all “stumbling toward grace” over a lifetime as Lee did.
Phil Berryman
Phillip E. Berryman is the author of several books on both liberation theology and the Christian experience in Latin America.
Lee at one of his peaceful vigils In Philadelphia
