Posted on 01/15/2010 6:19:34 AM PST by marshmallow
Mary Daly, a retired professor at Boston College who was probably the most outré of all the dissident theologians who came to the fore of Catholic intellectual life in the years right after the Second Vatican Council, died on Jan. 3 at age 81. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, which might be called the golden age of Catholic dissidence, theologians who took positions challenging traditional church teachings—ranging from the authority of the pope to bans on birth control, premarital sex, and women's ordination—dominated Catholic intellectual life in America and Europe. They seemed to represent a tide that would overwhelm the old restrictions and their hidebound adherents.
Now, 45 years after Vatican II concluded in 1965, most of those bright lights of dissident Catholicism—from the theologian Hans Küng of the University of Tübingen to Charles Curran, the priest dismissed from the Catholic University of America's theology faculty in 1987 for his advocacy of contraception and acceptance of homosexual relationships—seem dimmed with advanced age, if not extinguished. They have left no coherent second generation of dissident Catholic intellectuals to follow them.
Prof. Daly certainly pushed the envelope. In 1968, she published "The Church and the Second Sex," a book that accused the Catholic Church of oppressing and "humiliating" women by excluding them from its "patriarchal" hierarchy. The title of her most famous work, "Beyond God the Father" (1973), is self-explanatory. At some point afterward, Prof. Daly, despite being raised Catholic and earning degrees in theology and literature from three different Catholic colleges plus the University of Fribourg, left the church to embrace ever more belligerent brands of feminism.
She got into trouble with Boston College, the Jesuit institution where she had taught since 1966, for barring men from her advanced classes in women's studies.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
All that's left behind is an ugly mess for others to clean up.
“As the Flame of Catholic Dissent Dies Out”
Proof that there is a God......
They were bitter, ugly people who have no second generation because - well, why would you follow them?
I think the Church failed them, though. They were rarely dealt with firmly by the authority of the Church, which really had the responsibility to call them to account and explain to them where they were wrong. As a result, they were allowed to sink deeper and deeper into bitterness and pride.
People complain when the Church exercises its power to correct and chastize, but it is for the good of the souls entrusted to the care of the Church. Failure to do this duty leaves these souls to wander further and further into the wilderness...and to take others with them.
Not that conservative Catholicism is in any better straits; it's a vibrant but niche branch of the religion, and its leading intellectuals—Robert George, Mary Ann Glendon—aren't theologians.
Its leading intellectual is Pope Benedict, and he most certainly is a theologian.
“...and to take others with them.”
People looked at these losers and saw that the bishops really didn’t seem to care too much about what they spewed(no doubt many bishops agreed with the radical libs) and formed opinions accordingly. It’s a shame.
Freegards
Daly is gone. The Catholic church is still here.
May God have mercy on her.
I pray that the powers that be may never allow any such flames in the future to get beyond the spark stage.
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