Ivan Illich, defrocked Catholic itinerant priest who spent a lifetime unmasking the pernicious hold of institutions and professionals on our lives, passed away in Bremen, Germany, on December 2, 2002. He was 76.

Perhaps the last of the great iconoclasts (Foucault, Bourdieu, Paul Goodman, Schumacher, among others) of his generation, Illich's controversial views on education, medicine, justice, work and development found manya sympathiser. However, they also brought him in head-on confrontation with the many "experts' he had chosen to denigrate.

In a perverse irony, he died to a deafening silence of the world