The rediscovery of Catholicism: End or Beginning? reveals the distinctiveness of Mary Daly’s mature thought. In her abandoned essay, she relies on male thinkers who contributed to her own philosophic education: Thomas Aquinas, Teilhard de Chardin, Mircea Eliade, Jacques Maritain, and Paul Tillich. Daly supposed she could weave the abstractions of these men into a workable ontology, but she failed. Her immediate experience in the Women’s Liberation Movement led her to recognize a dynamism that could not be held by any reified image of the divine, let alone a brittle organization like the Catholic Church. This essay compares Catholicism: End or Beginning? to parallel passages in Daly’s later works, Beyond God the Father and Pure Lust, to demonstrate the transformative power of Daly’s “creative political ontology.”

The newly discovered manuscript, Catholicism: End or Beginning?, adds another dimension to the study of Mary Daly. It is probably a bridge from the Early Daly to the Later Daly, connecting her cradle Catholicism and early adult Catholicism with her mature adult feminist rejection of things Catholic. This essay focuses on three central questions: (1) What were the straws that broke the Catholic camel’s back for Mary? (2) How did the strenuous rejection of the patriarchal Roman Catholic Church still reflect Mary’s rootedness in Catholicism? (3) Is this manuscript a game-changer with regard to how scholars might interpret Mary Daly in the twenty-first century? With no guarantees of definitive answers to any or all of these questions, Mary Hunt offers a perspective on Daly’s many and agile minds.

Mary Daly was a witness to the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council, and in the 1960s had great hope for the reform of the Roman Catholic Church. She subsequently became convinced that patriarchal Catholicism would never include women fully and on the same basis as men. Yet she sustained a spirituality of connection to “transcendent reality” or “Be-ing,” with which she sought more authentic connection through feminist sisterhood and a genre-breaking form of theopoetics.

With the publication of Beyond God the Father in 1973, Mary Daly publicly declared Christianity to be irredeemably patriarchal and oppressive to women and brothers, “if there are any here”. At the time of writing Catholicism: End or Beginning?, however, Daly still laid claim to her religious tradition and considered it to be a living faith. For Daly, the Catholic substance and the Protestant principle are radical elements and resources within Christianity that must be centralized anew. In this essay, I argue that by taking Daly’s challenge seriously, those who continue to identify as Christian can embody the authentic faith she envisioned – one that calls for both critique and transformation. This faith reintegrates the Catholic substance and Protestant principle simultaneously, while also reviving two essential dimensions of being church: the death of “symbols [that] no longer speak to our age,” and a conscious awareness that the divine resides deeply within the human self. Drawing on Daly’s manuscript, I outline three defining marks and three core sensibilities of a Dalyan ecclesiology – one that remains profoundly relevant today as a safeguard against the church becoming what she called a “mummified bod[y].”

This essay examines Mary Daly’s unfinished manuscript through the lens of a scholar from a distinct cultural and intellectual background. Reflecting on the author’s first encounter with Beyond God the Father as a philosophy student in early 2000s Iran, the essay reinterprets Daly’s Catholicism: End or Beginning? beyond its Western context. It highlights Daly’s “logic of doubt” as both a method and an epistemic value promoting empathy and inclusivity. This marks a shift from the resolute tone of her earlier works to a more dialogical critique of institutional religion. The essay also explores Daly’s theorization of difference as a foundation for a transformative, humanist theology. By centering love, communication, and openness, Daly proposes a universalist vision of faith that transcends doctrinal limits. Ultimately, the essay argues that her manuscript lays the groundwork for a theology of peace and diversity, contributing to contemporary discussions on coexistence.