What is Wrong with Proselytizing for the American Way of Life

For Illich, ministry to Puerto Ricans required a complete surrender of one’s own cultural values. He understood this surrender in explicitly Christian terms, equating it with the surrender of the will that precedes the reception of grace in traditional Christian theology. Although he was familiar with modern social theory, Illich nonetheless understood this surrender of cultural assumptions not in terms of objectivity or tolerance, but as “a beatitude of cultural poverty.” Illich spent vacations in Puerto Rico, walking and hitchhiking across the country, performing priestly duties and soaking up the peasant culture of the people; he became convinced that the future vitality of Puerto Rican Catholicism depended on the maintenance of Puerto Rican cultural traditions. One commentator on Illich has claimed that “if he had had his way he would have totally transferred the church of the campesinos, with its unpunctuality, its semi-pagan rituals, its great community feast days, to the streets of New York.” The appeal to tradition provided Illich with a language through which to subvert Spellman’s Americanization goals without appearing subversive.

Carnival in New York in tNP

In all our zeal for spreading democracy and freedom, there is no death to self and death to the world before the preaching of the "good news" of America and her saving power which is supposed to rescue others from tyranny and poverty.