Follow-Up to WATERtalk with Meg Stapleton Smith “Catholicism: End or Beginning?”

Follow-up to WATERtalk Catholicism: End or Beginning? by Mary Daly 

Edited by Meg Stapleton Smith

Wednesday, March 11, 2026, 1 PM ET

WATER had the privilege of hosting the first public discussion of Catholicism: End or Beginning? by Mary Daly Edited by Meg Stapleton Smith (Cambridge University Press, 2026). We were joined by some of the authors of the chapters that accompany the newly discovered unfinished Daly manuscript: Lisa Sowle Cahill, Jennifer Rycenga, Xochitl Alvizo, and Mary E. Hunt. Generous book blurbs on the volume by Laurel C. Schneider, Marie Fortune, and Judith Plaskow were noted, as well as by Mary Condren who was able to be present for this event from Ireland. We thanked Alex Wright, Senior Executive Publisher & Head of Humanities at Cambridge University Press, who understood this book from the beginning.

The program began with a land acknowledgement. We also spent a moment reflecting with deepest regret on the wars in Gaza/Israel, Ukraine/Russia, and now in the Middle East with 15 countries and hundreds of casualties including scores of school children. We at WATER condemn the violence that the U.S. perpetrates and join with people of good will worldwide in non-violent efforts to stem the tide. May this session be a contribution toward peace. 

We mentioned another chapter author, Zahra Moballegh who is from Iran, wishing her and her family and friends all the best during this terrible war. And, we acknowledged the recent passing of Emily Culpepper, a dear friend and collaborator of Mary Daly, a longtime professor at University of Redlands, and a colleague to many in the American Academy of Religion. We mourn her loss. 

The video of this session and these notes can be found at https://www.waterwomensalliance.org/catholicism-end-or-beginning-with-meg-stapleton-smith/   .Please feel free to share this material with others. 

Mary E. Hunt’s Introduction to Meg Stapleton Smith

Meg Stapleton Smith is an adjunct professor of theology and ethics at Fordham University and an Episcopal priest. She did her BA at Boston College, an MA at Yale in Ethics, and a PhD at Fordham University writing about “Queer Virtue Ethics: Mary Daly’s Challenge to Catholic Sexual Ethics.” 

She is, as this book gives evidence, a super sleuth of a researcher. Faced with her own questions about Mary Daly’s work, she found this unfinished, unpublished manuscript that Jennifer Rycenga and I, or some other naïve souls, innocently put into the Mary Daly Archive at the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College. Thanks, Meg, you rescued us from a huge mistake!

Meg’s lovely remarks in the Acknowledgement section of this book tell her story well:

“In Mary Daly’s work, she makes many references to the ways that the women of today are the embodiment and realization of the dreams and hopes of women from the past. I never met Mary Daly, as many contributors to this volume have, but I am convinced that my vocational life would not be possible had it not been for her courage. I am a queer, married, Episcopal priest and theological ethicist, who is trained in Roman Catholic theology (and shaped by Thomas Aquinas’ theology, as Daly was). Even though Mary Daly would have had many questions for me, as I would for her, the fact that I exist in all of the spaces is a testament to the path that she, and so many other feminist theologians and philosophers, paved. May we all continue to raise up new images of be-ing, as Mary Daly did for us.” 

You’ve done her proud in this wonderful book, Meg. I’m sure you and Mary would have had a lot to talk about and enjoyed doing it.  

Meg Stapleton Smith’s Remarks

I’d like to begin by offering my sincere gratitude to Mary Hunt for this invitation. This is one of those full circle moments – Mary was the first person I called when I unearthed this manuscript in Daly’s archives. And I also remember my first visit to WATER and Mary showing me all the copies of Daly’s books in the library that Daly herself had signed, “To WATER, with courage!”

My talk will be broken into three parts today. In the first part, I will offer a bit about the story behind discovering this manuscript. The second part I will offer what I consider to be the most fascinating parts of the manuscript – and how they foreshadow the intellectual journey that Daly went on to take. By way of conclusion, I’ll offer a reflection on how this foreshadowing helps us to grapple with the central question of the manuscript – has Catholicism reached its end or is there hope for a genuine new beginning?”

So, first – how I came to discover this manuscript. 

During the last semester of my doctoral studies we were assigned Mary Daly’s The Church and the Second Sex. Admittedly, it took 8 years into my theological training to realize that Mary Daly had written anything after 1974. In my time studying at Boston College, Yale, and Fordham, I had been handed the conventional narrative: although Mary Daly charted the way for feminist theology, her career ended when she left the Roman Catholic Church. 

Reading The Church and the Second Sex during that last semester brought forth a new set of questions – I was struck by the difference between the Mary Daly who wrote the book in 1968 and the Daly in 1975 and 1985 who ruthlessly scrutinize her own previous writings. The difference between the “early Daly” and the “later Daly” struck me – and encouraged me to delve deeper into her scholarship and philosophical vision. As I write in the Introduction to the volume, I was enthralled by her brilliance and her iconoclastic radicalism – drawn to the woman who dared to say what so many others of her time could not. I was captivated by her relentless hope to dream that a different world was possible.

But above all I was intrigued by this woman who was trained as a Roman Catholic theologian. The woman who received three PhD’s in Catholic theology – the “lady’s degree” she received from St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana, since women weren’t admitted to theology PhD programs in the U.S. at the time, and two PhD’s in theology and philosophy she received from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. I was fascinated by the woman who “borrowed” a journalists press pass and snuck into the Second Vatican Council. The same woman who grew up in a Catholic home in upstate New York.

As I read more about Daly I began to notice her indebtedness to Thomas Aquinas – how her own philosophy in many ways mirrored the theological underpinnings of Catholic moral thought. And how she even continued to engage Catholic sources all the way through Amazon Grace and Quintessence. So I began to wonder whether or not Mary Daly abandoned the Catholic Church as vehemently as contemporary Catholic academics suggest she had after her infamous walk out of patriarchal religion at Harvard Memorial Church on that autumn day in 1971.

I became convinced there was a part of Daly’s story that wasn’t being told.

I guess I went to the archives in search of an untold story, to try uncovering parts of Daly’s story that might be worth returning to.

I began looking through the boxes from the years of 1968-1973 – the time in between the writing of The Church and the Second Sex and Beyond God the Father. And that’s when I came across the folder entitled, “Catholicism: End or Beginning.” Contained within were four chapters of the unfinished book. She had only drafted about half the chapters she had planned and outlined.

And that is what you have before you today. 

Now I will shift to what I find to be the most fascinating aspects of this manuscript – other than its existence, which is thrilling enough! At the time Daly was writing this manuscript, which I date to about 1969-1970 – she believed the state of Christianity could be understood as a dialectic between what she called the “Protestant principle” and the “Catholic substance” – the “Catholic substance” is the “sacraments, the creeds, the liturgical ceremonies, the dogmas,” and the Protestant principle is “an attitude which is self-critical, and which recognizes the relativity of all objectification of faith.” 

As Xochitl Alvizo rightly names in her chapter in the volume – Daly brings the Catholic substance and the Protestant principle into view in order to highlight a central problem – namely, that when the elements of the Catholic substance are fixed “void of the Protestant principle and made into idols” it creates what Daly terms “demonic sacramentalism.” In turn, the Catholic substance loses sight of those original revelatory experiences which brought it into being. If the Protestant principle and Catholic substance are held in a productive tension with one another then they can generate a “theonomous synthesis” and authentic faith. The crisis of faith that we see in our midst, Daly contends, is the inability to keep the dialectic between the “Protestant principle” and the “Catholic substance.”

Even as Daly wrote about the desire for this theonomous synthesis, she said that there is no guarantee that disintegration wouldn’t happen. And I wonder as she constructed her own vision of the theonomous synthesis if she felt some emptiness or apathy. “Has Catholicism reach it’s end or is there hope for a genuine new beginning?” she asks.

The theonomous synthesis was the best that she could conjure up for the hope of a new beginning for Catholicism. Within the particular frame of reference she was working within – at the time – that was the best her intellectual efforts could produce. And I wonder how limiting that dream felt. 

And that leads us to one of the most pressing questions of the text – which is why did Mary Daly abandon writing this text? My sense is that it was, in part, the result of how limiting that theological vision felt.

In Outercourse, she is fairly flippant about dropping the manuscript. She writes, “One might say this was the beginning of the end of my concern over the fate of Catholicism. Probably the question mark at the end of each title was the most significant part. At any rate,” she continues, “the project failed to sustain my interest. It fell apart in the middle, or, one could say that was an abortive effort.”

The authors in the volume, myself included, believe that the unfinished manuscript is not merely an example of academic procrastination or that it simply stopped meeting her own intellectual curiosities. Rather, the fact that she stopped writing the manuscript is actually profoundly significant and mirrors her own intellectual and spiritual journey.  

For Lisa Cahill, Daly’s hope in reformist Catholicism had been lost. Cahill maintains that Daly left the Church in search of a deeper relationship with the Good and in search of feminist community that was nowhere to be found within the church at the time. For other authors in the volume – including Hunt, Garrigan and Rycenga – the death of Daly’s mother, her own sexual awakening, and the socio-historical context of the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, and feminist movements all contributed to her moving on from the manuscript and the Catholic Church. It’s unsurprising, Garrigan observes, that the manuscript ends when Daly gets to the question of Christ – for it would have demanded Daly to engage with the practice, and required the book to become “fleshing, feeling, and individual” rather than “heady, abstract, and corporate.” The personal, Garrigan concludes, did indeed get political.

Now as the editor I did not write a chapter reflecting on the content of the manuscript. But if I had – I would have focused on how her discussions of the Catholic substance and Protestant principle, as well as her discussion of courage, foreshadowed what Daly later developed as the virtue of “The Courage to Leave.” So I will talk a little bit about that now.

In the manuscript, Daly draws on Tillich’s distinction between individualization and participation. At this point in her career, Daly (following Tillich) articulates existential courage as having two sides: the courage to be as a self, and the courage to be as a part. The former, self-affirmation as a self, implies that one must struggle for autonomy and authenticity “even if this means painful clashes with external authorities, civil or ecclesiastical.” This courage, Daly writes, “demands that we be constantly ready to criticize established laws, doctrines, and practices and that we be ready for the emergence of new forms.” On the other hand, Daly continues, the courage to be also involves self-affirmation as a part. “This means that we should be faithful to the values which are preserved … the voice of tradition, the body of symbols, doctrines, and structures we have inherited should be held in the esteem they deserve. Daly concludes, “The courage to be as a part demands that we continue to recognize whatever there is of value in the tradition which formed us and which formed the Christian community, while participating in the process of developing that tradition.”

In the “New Archaic Afterwords” to The Church and the Second Sex (written roughly sixteen years after Catholicism: End or Beginning) Daly writes, “The basic terror-engendering error is belief that the church has something special to offer, that something irreplaceable is bestowed upon women by and through the church godfathers, and that leaving the church means spiritual death.” She continues, “The Courage to Leave springs from deep knowledge of the nucleus of nothingness which is at the core of the fallacious faith that freezes/fixes its victims.” This understanding of courage and its relationship to institutional Christianity undoubtedly stands in stark contrast to Daly’s words in Catholicism: End or Beginning. This dissonance is emblematic of the intellectual journey that Daly took over the course of her career – namely, that Daly began her career with hope that the church could change and ended her career with the belief that all ecclesial structures and religious institutions are irredeemably patriarchal. 

As seen in Daly’s words from the “New Archaic Afterwords,” this is unmistakably a feature of her vision for she clearly writes that institutionalized religion is the enemy of women’s flourishing. For Daly, the Courage to Leave is a virtue which empowers women to leave the church in order to achieve “psychic wholeness” and liberation. 

But as I understand Daly’s intellectual journey, there is a tension between the idea that there is a “deep knowledge of the nucleus of nothingness which is at the core of the fallacious faith,” and “participating in developing that tradition.” Even though Daly maintained that “all churches are manifestations of patriarchal religion,” she continued to draw on Catholic methodologies and Christian sources to construct her vision of hope. Daly held onto the truth that there was, as she wrote in Catholicism: End or Beginning, “value in the tradition which formed her” even as she discarded elements of Catholic teaching that inhibited her own dynamism of be-ing.

Daly’s own story is evidence that “leaving” an institutional religion is not as simple as walking out the doors of a building. Which is why I think that this manuscript not only foreshadows the “courage to leave” but more profoundly Daly’s concept of “boundary living” as the place and space where that “psychic wholeness” and liberation is achieved.

Daly refers to “boundary living” throughout her corpus, but the best description can be found in her 1978 book Gyn/Ecology. While addressing critics who claimed that her work is “separatist,” Daly offers her own definition of separatism. Drawing on the etymology of the word, Daly contends that “the deep questions that are being asked [about separatism] concern the problem of paring away the Self from all that is alienating and confining” (381).

When Daly referred to “boundary living” she meant, quite literally, existing on the boundary of patriarchal institutions in order to create a space where women’s experience may be at the center of theological, philosophical, and political reflection. Yet, for Daly, boundary living also demanded a continual, intentional practice of “paring away the Self from all that is alienating and confining.” “Boundary living,” Daly writes in Beyond God the Father, “is a way of being in and out of ‘the system.’ It entails a refusal of false clarity” (43). 

In the unfinished manuscript Daly writes that one must recognize the ‘complexity’ of what it means to leave the Catholic Church. In fact, for one to claim that individuals are either “inside” or “outside” the church is a false dichotomy. Moving “outside” the church does not necessarily mean abandoning it in every sense, she writes. One could describe themselves as an alumna of the church, an expression which conveys the fact that a person is not severing all relationship to the church but rather “establishing a free and adult relationship to it.” To pursue the analogy, she continues, “alumni are in fact what an institution of learning is intended to produce, rather than perpetual undergraduates.” The point of the church is not to “foster religious infantilism but spiritual adulthood.” 

Daly maintains that there are some religious and nonreligious thinkers who cannot sustain the idea of an individual having an “outside-inside relationship to Catholicism”. There are scholars who think that people on the boundary of institutional Catholicism are “doomed to a kind of isolation and ineffectiveness.” And yet, she concludes “those who have been conditioned within the Catholic milieu can bring a critical distance into the “tradition which is their heritage.”

In the “Feminist Postchristian Introduction to The Church and the Second Sex,” Daly reflected on her own belief in 1968 that change within the church often comes from individuals outside the church. She writes in 1978 that her concept of change from coming from outside that religious tradition did not satisfy her, for “she was not outside enough.” Perhaps implying that the further she was from the church within this boundary space, the more liberated she would become and the more change she would bring to the church.

All of this for me suggests that, yes, Daly had the Courage to Leave the Catholic Church, and institutional religion – to see, as she went on to define the virtue – the “nucleus of nothingness” that is at the core of all patriarchal religions. And yet, I hope that my remarks demonstrate that this volume shows the path Daly took to the space of boundary living – maintaining that inside/outside relationship with the Catholic Church. But, as Mary Hunt writes in her essay, “In and out of the church is trivial. She did not go anyplace. She went everywhere.” 

Importantly, even after she walked out of patriarchal religion, Daly continued to develop the tradition in which she was formed. She continued to participate in the process of changing the Christian, and indeed Catholic, theological tradition, radically transforming the institution from outside its walls.

—————————————————————————–

WATER thanks Meg Stapleton Smith and all of the chapter contributors for their insights.

Discussion ensued. Watch the video at  https://www.waterwomensalliance.org/catholicism-end-or-beginning-with-meg-stapleton-smith/ to get a full sense of the conversation. Some highlights included:

1. One colleague reported that she had playfully accused Mary Daly of “Peeping Thomism,” given how much of that Catholic framework of thinking she retained. Mary Daly laughed about it.
2. On the occasion of Mary Daly’s walk out from Memorial Church, one person said that someone she knew had walked out, but went back in for coffee after the service. It was a wonderful example of the complexity and ambiguity of many people’s responses to Daly’s invitation to leave the church. 
3. Jennifer Rycenga quoted Emily Culppeper who spoke of “Christianity as compost” calling it garbage, but useful garbage. Jennifer and Mary E. Hunt took Mary Daly her copy of the Summa Theologica to the assisted living place where she moved from her apartment (circa 2008). Mary gently and lovingly received the book, fingering it carefully and with emotion, indicating how much it meant to her. 
4. Lisa Cahill remarked about the time in Mary’s life that this book represented, as starting with a new vision and not adding to the past. Inside/Outside boundaries of most things are very broad and porous now. Previously, things were rather strictly binary; now it is easier to have both insider and outside status. This is a generational shift. 

Critiques as to why Daly did not quote more women and why she did not use inclusive language can be answered by the fact that they didn’t exist before she empowered her colleagues and raised the issues of exclusion. Also, it was noted that Sister Madeleva Wolff set up the “ladies’ degree,” a doctorate for women at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, IN, because women were not admitted to most Catholic doctoral programs in the 1950’s. 

8. Xochitl Alvizo added that Mary was ahead of her time. She expressed appreciation for the many tools Mary Daly provided, especially for those who have stayed in the Christian tradition. Mary’s appreciation for intellectual  inheritance and the ability to embrace it help those who stay within the Chrisitan tradition.
9. Another colleague raised the question of Mary Daly and Thomas Aquinas, both of whom left behind unfinished manuscripts. Why did they do that? His concern with teleology and her sense that there was something much deeper, the Good, seem to be factors. Thomas’ own spiritualty might have encouraged Mary Daly to leave aside what no longer felt useful to her. 
10. Lavinia Byrne, in her recent review of Catholicism: End or Beginning? raised the question of Mary Daly as a mystic https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2026/6-march/books-arts/book-reviews/book-review-catholicism-end-or-beginning-by-mary-daly-edited-by-meg-stapleton-smith. This could be a subject for fruitful discussion. 
11. “The great fun is on the boundaries!” proclaimed Rosemary B. Ganley, Canadian critical journalist and regular columnist for The Peterborough Examiner. Many affirmed this from experience!
12. Irish theologian Mary Condren was a student of Mary Daly’s in 1979 when she went to Harvard. She signed up to take classes with Mary Daly at Boston College and fought with Mary Daly over substantive issues though they became friends.  Mary Daly endorsed Mary Condren’s book The Serpent and the Goddess. Mary Daly critiqued her students, including Mary Condren, who went to protest the pope on his visit to Boston because she felt that the women were begging to be allowed into a patriarchal structure. Mary Daly later visited Ireland and explored  divine vibrations, Irish energy, and tried to imbibe the good energies. 
13. One person asked if this manuscript adds anything to what we already know of Daly. Mary Condren opined that what changed Mary Daly was her encounter with sociology and anthropology. Daly engaged in a critique of “cultural capital.” Daly brought many sociological thinkers into the theological conversation. She was very much aware of the dangers of nuclear weapons, reminding students of the Doomsday Clock. In that sense, she was both a speculative and practical theologian, not as chapter author Siobhán Garrrigan suggested only a speculative theologian. Mary E. Hunt offered that the binary framing in this case misses that liberation theologies, in this case nascent feminist liberation theology, is based in both speculative and practical aspects, indeed in theory and praxis. 
14. Institutional Catholicism seems to have had little to do with Mary Daly. Did her ideas shape synodality? Did Catholic thinkers, even Pope Leo ever read her? One person said that she had read Mary Daly in a small institute in Florida that has since been shuttered. This colleague reported that Dr. Mercedes Iannone, professor at the Institute of Pastoral Ministries at St. Thomas University in Florida, assigned Mary Daly’s work to her students. 
15. The centennial of Mary Daly’s birth will be October 16, 2028. It is time to have this kind of conversation in larger public spaces, perhaps at Boston College.
16. Meg Stapleton Smith said that Mary Daly paved the way for feminist theology and was seen as a rebel. Meg found no modern Catholic theologian citing any of Mary Daly’s work after Beyond God the Father. She suggests that the later works need to be read together. She suspects that Pope Leo XIV may have read Beyond God the Father. Mary E. Hunt rather doubts it. 

WATER thanks Meg and colleagues for this wonderful exposition and conversation. To be continued!