Celebrating and Cerebrating Mary Daly (1928–2010)

This panel had to be on Halloween! Warm thanks to Emily Culpepper and Jennifer Rycenga for organizing this event. As part of Team Mary Daly, they have been very effective in their efforts to assure Mary’s legacy. I offer thanks to Michelene Pensantubbee and Rosetta Ross for their encouragement to present this panel in the Women and Religion Section. I also want to express my gratitude to Ann Taves and Robert Puckett of the AAR for their acknowledgment of the importance of Mary Daly to the life of the academic study of religion even if she thought all of us were academented.

Many themes will emerge from this distinguished panel of colleagues. I have already written and spoken extensively on Mary’s life,¹ so one might reasonably wonder whether I have anything new to say about her. Fear not. Because I have written about her in broad terms, this contribution is focused very narrowly on her relationship to Catholicism, which is one way that I understand her within the broader discussion.

My friend Carol Adams always reminded me that Mary Daly and I had a special bond because of being upstate New York Irish Catholics by background and feminist scholars and activists by foreground. I have come to see Carol’s wisdom. I share three anecdotes in the tradition of an Irish wake with which Mary Daly was familiar, then offer three reflections that emerge from them as a way of saying how I think Mary and Catholicism interfaced, better, faced off. To foreshadow my conclusion, Mary won.

When Team Daly prepared Mary’s papers to be archived at the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, we found many treasures. Among them were postcards from Rome that Mary sent to her mother, Anna Daly, who was living with Mary in Fribourg, Switzerland, at the time. This was in the mid-1960s when Mary was a graduate student doing her double doctorates in Europe during the Second Vatican Council. Mary penned a note to her mother—all this pre–cell phone and e-mail—to say that she ought not worry if Mary did not return on the day she was scheduled as she was having such a great time in Rome. Her fun consisted of hanging around the Council, talking with journalists over strong Italian coffee, and meeting bishops and other theologians along the way. It was a heady time for a young Catholic woman who apparently harbored some hope that there was a place for her in the whole mix.

Even the most casual reader of Mary Daly knows that the story did not turn out that way. Instead, she gradually came to see the absurdity of the pompous plumed patriarchs and the futility of their efforts to lead anyone anywhere as long as women, queer people, and the majority of the Catholic population in most parts of the world were banned from their Eurocentric deliberations.

She wrote The Church and the Second Sex (1968) as a report of those experiences with still some hope that things might change. As institutional Catholic repression only increased, she issued Beyond God the Father (1973) to clarify that any hopes of an inclusive church were in vain and that women ought to move on to greener pastures. Her reissuing of The Church and the Second Sex with the Feminist Post-Christian Introduction and New Archaic Afterwords by the Author (1986) left no doubt about her view of the Roman Catholic Church as a corrupt institution. This was before the public revelation of priest pedophilia and its cover-up by bishops. I daresay Mary was ahead of the curve.

A second story brings us up several decades to the early 1980s, when many Catholic women, thanks to the insights of Mary and other feminist scholars, had long since kicked the dust from our Birkenstocks and started the women-church movement. It continues to be an effort to take the best values of our tradition— love, justice, mutuality, and equality—and live them out in local base communities and organizations so that we can focus...