“The Priests of Patriarchy”
May 10, 2010
FEMINISM has battered most of the major Christian denominations during the past 40 years. Here is an apt quote from Mary Daly’s Beyond God the Father, most recently published in paperback in 1985. Daly, who died early this year, was a professor of theology at the Jesuit institution, Boston College, for 33 years.
She wrote:
The cosmic covenant means coming into living harmony with the self, the universe and God.
For men of the past – and most are living in the past rather than now – life has meant feeding on the bodies and minds of women, sapping energy at the expense of female deaths. Like Dracula, the he-male has lived on women’s blood. The priests of patriarchy have eaten the body and have drunk the blood of the Sacrificial Victim in their Mass, but they have not wished to know who has really been the Victim whose blood supported this parasitic life.
The insatiable lust of males for female blood has resulted in a perpetual blood transfusion throughout the millennia–a one-way outpouring into the veins and arteries of the bloodthirsty monster, the Male Machine that now can continue its obscene life only by genocide. If the Machine dreams, it is of a future filled with megadeaths. The total vampire no longer needs even to speak of blood, which is after all visible, measurable. It drinks instead in quantities calculable only through the highest mathematics …
… It is men who have sapped the life-force of women.
— Comments —
John E. writes:
Kristor commented in a previous post (“The Christian Wimp”):
When we struggle with sin, we struggle with demons.
It seems with Daly we get a clearer view of the real enemy, for those with sight to see it. The enemy was not her, and I think it important to always remember that her nature as a woman remained, damaged as it was, but I don’t see how you can read her words and not be faced with a choice to either hate and despair, or fight for good and truth.
Laura writes:
She spoke fighting words if anyone did, and was allowed to continue on her way in a major Catholic institution.
Randy B. writes:
Obviously Mary Daly [was] mentally ill, and reads nothing but feminist diatribes and Vampire lore. I was at the movie this Saturday, and after the next (sic) Twilight Movie one of the simple folk blurted out with a shrill shriek of euphoria. I wonder if Mary was visiting Utah this weekend?
I also loved the fact that she views men as parasites. Like all feminists, I’m sure that only applies to white males; not the entrepreneur’s from the Ghetto that have twelve children out of wedlock before they turn twenty and are killed in a financial dispute over their powered business stock. Yup, it’s the white male head of household taxpayer that is leaching off the women of the world, without whom all men would be reduced to spineless piles of gelatin.
Laura writes:
I doubt she was visiting not only because she is now dead but because I don’t think she was into popular culture too much. She was an academic who prided herself on her abstruse thinking. I did read her in college, or a little bit after college. She liked to play with words: Gyn/ecology was one of her favorites.
She was mentally ill, but in the sense G.K. Chesterton defined insanity. The insane do not suffer from irrationality so much as hyper-rationality in one area. The paranoid live in the prison cell of a single idea. The person who thinks someone is following him reads all the world’s cues as proof of that. Daly, as far as I can tell, reduced all of history and all of philosophy to one simple idea: the oppression of women by men, and she expressed this idea in particularly lurid and extreme language, all the while maintaining the reputation as a “theologian.” She did get into trouble briefly when she banned men from her classes at Boston College. She was forced to retire in 1999.
