ABSTRACT
While Peter Steinfels believes that liberal Catholicism is "papal teaching a hundred years too soon," the reality remains that, in many ways, rather than looking to the future of the Church, most Catholic feminists look back to the earliest days of the Catholic Church to find support for issues like women's ordination. Despite her retirement from Boston College, Mary Daly continues to be an important icon for feminist theologians because she was the first to publish a feminist perspective of women's role in theology. The Church and the Second Sex, published in 1968, became what some still view as the feminist movement's foundational text. Although Mary Daly certainly cannot be viewed as representative of all feminist theologians on Catholic campuses today, her theme of a misogynistic Church designed to oppress women is a consistent one that has been adopted by most left-leaning theologians–both male and female.
