Channel:  The Wall Street Journal
Author: Charlotte Allen

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.
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I am not so sure that is is correct to characterize the intellectual movement that flowered under and continued after Vatican II “dissent.”  Much of it was simply a logical extension of “opening the windows.”  Liberation Theology grew from a then mainstream premise, that God has a preferential option for the poor and that the poor were a vital source for interpreting the Gospel to those in power.  Until J2P2 set Ratzinger loose to scour the church of progressive thinking, the real ecumenical spirit and an openness to question all structures of authority was quite lively.

So it became “dissent” as the administration of Roman Rite Catholicism changed and moved to the right.

It’s worth remembering that Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger were present at Vatican II, and as reformers. As a conservative within the Episcopal Church, I got over my problems with being called a dissident a very long time ago.

If dissent is the wrong word, especially within the space limitations of a Wall Street Journal headline, what is the better word?

Michael, I don’t know how much late Mary Daly you have read. I read a chunk of Gyn/Ecology and looked about about ten pages of the Wickedary before putting them both on the Six Foot Shelf Of Heresy, Woo-Woo, And Nonsense. By the time she was writing these books, she certainly was not a Catholic dissident or even a Christian dissident, and at that point, I lost interest, because she had given up any real interest in talking to me. (There were other reasons, too, in the texts, which seems not so much wrong as just nonsense.)