Ode magazine, June 2007, on Ivan Illich—
When Ivan was 12, Hitler invaded Austria, prompting his decision never to bring children into this world. At the age of 16, before fleeing Vienna, he bribed the secretary of Nazi leader Hermann Goering – who had claimed Illich's family home – to free his grandfather. Ultimately, Illich did do well in school, studying philosophy and theology at the elite Pontifical Gregorian University in the Vatican, later earning a Ph.D. at the University of Salzburg. He travelled to India and soaked up Eastern philosophy during long discussions with the Indian Hindu and Catholic priest Ramon Panikkar in Varanasi (Benares), along the Ganges river. He was later ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in New York City. He became a professor at the Catholic University of Puerto Rico and moved to Mexico, where he founded an educational centre that challenged the Church’s embrace of modern development. He resigned from priesthood in the late 1960s because he no longer felt at home with the dogmas of the Catholic Church – "I have enough Jewish blood to be able to get angry with God" – and began his life as a philosopher and author.
Illich greeted us at his home in Bremen….
Panikkar died on August 26, 2010. See this journal on that date ("Home from Home continued"), with its link to math16.com and the reference there to Stevens's "The Owl in the Sarcophagus."
Related material—
A Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma (letters to The Guardian on Stephen Hawking's new book)
and Panikkar's book (published in Paris in 2002 and in Minneapolis, by a Lutheran press, in 2006)
The Experience of God: Icons of the Mystery.