Catholicism: End or Beginning?

In its obituary, the Guardian newspaper called Mary Daly (1928–2010) 'one of the key feminist writers of the twentieth century.' Challenging patriarchy in religion, society, and culture, Daly was a coruscating critic of the ways in which patriarchal institutions operate and discriminate. The Church and the Second Sex (1968), her best-known book, was an attempt to work within a Christian framework. Later works, such as Pure Lust (1984) and Outercourse (1992), emerged from a post-Christian mindset. Written after The Church and the Second Sex and before the influential Beyond God the Father (1973), Catholicism: End or Beginning? explores a renewed and revitalized ecclesiology that transcends the perceived dichotomy between 'Catholic substance' and the 'Protestant principle.' For Daly, resolving this polarity - by reclaiming a new freedom of spirit and intellectual power - would allow theologians to answer the central question: 'Has Catholicism reached its end, or is there hope for a genuine new beginning?' Meg Stapleton Smith is Adjunct Professor of Theology and Ethics at Fordham University and a theological ethicist, educator, and ordained priest in the Episcopal Church. She uncovered Mary Daly's unpublished work in the archives of Smith College where Daly's writings and papers are deposited. Its discovery will be exciting to anyone interested in Mary Daly's work and her extensive and continuing influence. The editor has commissioned additional chapters by prominent writers working at the interface of feminism, women's studies, theology, and philosophy. These show how Daly's text remains a potent contribution by one of the twentieth century's most important thinkers.

• Introduction Meg Stapleton Smith; Part I. Catholicism: End or Beginning? Mary Daly; Part II. Engagements and Reflections: 1. The Many Minds of Mary Daly Mary E. Hunt; 2. Reformist Catholicism: The Road Not Taken for Mary Daly Lisa Sowle Cahill; 3. Feminist Intrigues at the Limits of Schizoid Theology Siobhán Garrigan; 4. Abstraction, Mysticism, and Revolution: From Catholicism: End or Beginning? to Beyond God the Father and Pure Lust Jennifer Rycenga; 5. Catholicism: End or Beginning? An Open-ended Journey Toward a Theology of Difference Zahra Moballegh; 6. A More Dalyan Christianity Xochitl Alvizo.

'Mary Daly's unfinished Catholicism: End or Beginning? represents a brilliant example of a brilliant woman thinking, and indeed writing, out loud, as her explorations – and especially her burgeoning sense of the fundamental misogyny running through the institutions of Protestantism and Catholicism – led her to make an inevitable and inexorable break with those traditions that had no respect for what Luce Irigaray would call a dialectic between the sexes. It is an extraordinarily valuable record of a pioneering woman's struggle toward intellectual, theological, and personal integrity.' Mary Teresa Condren, Centre for Gender and Women's Studies, Trinity College, University of Dublin