Daly

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. But in fact, of course they do - or did, otherwise it wouldn't be funny. Everyone expected the Spanish Inquisition, anyone at all within the gravity well of Spain.
Bizarre behaviour really, rather horrid too.

Last week, a woman I'd never heard of died. But I don't know why I'd never heard of her, she seems like quite an incredible human being to me.
But I have heard a lot about her since she died.

Mary Daly.

Here is Sister Joan Chittister's blog post about her from the National Catholic Reporter.
Sr. Joan says that Mary Daly posed two questions that are at the heart of contemporary Christianity, hell they were at the heart of it even in the days of the Inquisition, but no-one would have dreamt of acknowledging it then, and most wouldn't now.

The idea of a male God, is that consistent with the idea of God as pure spirit?
A church which is patriarchal and therefore inauthentic, can it survive in its present form?

Sr. Joan goes on to say,
"Women need to thank Daly for bearing the rejection that too often comes to those who say a new insight first and say it consistently and say it in the face of the very system in which they themselves have been raised." Amen to that, oh yes, those of us who challenge and challenge consistently know that only too well.

And she says,
"In later years, Daly refused to accept men in some of her classes, forcing men to experience the exclusion that women had endured for centuries. As a result, she lost her tenured position at a Catholic college for allegedly failing to offer equal service to all students, both men and women. But at the same time, no one else in Catholic colleges — or elsewhere — lost their jobs for excluding women from access to theology degrees or various medical specialities, among others, on the grounds that women, as women, were unfit for such programs."
Amen again.

May she rest in peace, or, if it turns out that things need changing, may she continue to rage. I tend to think that others are finding out she was right.

And by the by, Simone de Beauvoir is stellar.