Mary Daly, a retired professor at Boston College who was probably the most outr\u00c3\u00a9 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\u201d\u201dranging from the authority of the pope to bans on birth control, premarital sex, and women’s ordination\u201d\u201ddominated Catholic intellectual life in America and Europe. They seemed to represent a tide that would overwhelm the old restrictions and their hidebound adherents.<\/p>\n
Now, 45 years after Vatican II concluded in 1965, most of those bright lights of dissident Catholicism\u201d\u201dfrom the theologian Hans K\u00c3\u00bcng of the University of T\u00c3\u00bcbingen 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\u201d\u201dseem dimmed with advanced age, if not extinguished. They have left no coherent second generation of dissident Catholic intellectuals to follow them.<\/p>\n