Catholicism: End or Beginning?

This recently discovered treatise from late feminist theologian Daly (Beyond God the Father) offers a bold if abstract take on the Catholic church’s mid-20th-century crisis of perceived irrelevance. The author, who died in 2010, abandoned the unfinished manuscript shortly after leaving the church in the late 1960s. In it, she argues that the institution was being weakened by the clash between its “uncritical assent to propositions proposed by ecclesiastical authority” and rising tides of individualism, rationalism, skepticism, and social mobility. As a corrective, she called for an integration of Catholicism’s “external, heteronomous authority” and Protestantism’s rationalist doubt; this, she suggested, might create a robust faith that balanced reason with belief and individuality with community. But religion, she argued, also means extending beyond the bounds of literalism to embrace an element of divine mystery that links believers to the “infinite power of being” and could attract young people repelled by institutional convention and hungry for spiritual meaning. Despite her academic and often abstract prose, Daly’s analysis is clear-sighted, perceptive, and bolstered by rich theological, philosophical, and historical context. Six essays from contemporary scholars helpfully situate the work within the history of Christianity and Daly’s career. It’s a worthy revisiting of an important American Catholic thinker. (Jan.)