c. 1999 Religion News Service

(The Rev. Carter Heyward is an Episcopal priest and professor of theology at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass.)

UNDATED _ One of the most widely read and radical feminist theologians in the world today, Mary Daly, is just too much for the good Christian gentlemen at Boston College.

This is nothing new, of course. To many of her colleagues’ dismay, Daly has been teaching feminist philosophy and ethics for 30 years at the Jesuit institution, which is nestled only minutes away from the cardinal’s residence in suburban Boston.

For three decades, this fierce foe of sexism has been scaring the socks (and other things) off Christian men and many women. All the while, she has inspired, delighted and empowered countless women.

Many women, after all, know deep in our bones that the church is sexist. Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, Baptist and Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian, Episcopal and even the liberal Congregationalists all continue to be battlegrounds for full gender inclusivity and sexual diversity.

But we do not see easily the truths that hurt us most deeply.

In this context, Daly has been the teacher who has appeared when Christian women have been ready to see the ancient and devastating truth: Women’s lives and dreams, our yearnings and hopes, do not count for much in the naming and shaping of the Christian faith.

Those”women”whose lives do matter in Christianity are not real women; they are caricatures constructed by church fathers who imagine they themselves speak for God.

Thus, the church beatifies those women whom it can idealize as the perfect wife, mother or daughter. Real women _ actual wives, mothers and daughters _ are vilified for our disobedience and selfishness, to the extent that we yearn to pursue our dreams, follow our hearts and make our own paths.

The most villainous women of all, to church fathers, are those women who choose neither to marry nor remain celibate, women who for whatever reasons choose not to give birth, and women who choose to live openly in the company of other women, apart from men, in ways simply unimaginable to the sexist mindset of good Christian men.

Daly has been chief advocate and comforter to these villainous Christian females, these deviant women of faith who lust after life rather than submission in the world of God. It hardly comes as a surprise that Boston College is trying to get rid of this feminist rabble-rouser. But the timing and circumstances of the college’s efforts to fire its most renowned professor are worth noting.

According to the Mary Daly Defense Fund _ established this spring to prevent the college from terminating Daly _ in the fall of 1998, a male student represented by the Center for Individual Rights challenged her right to teach women-only classes in feminist ethics. The student declined Daly’s offer to instruct him in a separate section and instead threatened to sue Boston College for violating Title IX, which bars sex discrimination in education.

Boston College ordered Daly to enroll the student in her class, despite his lack of the academic prerequisites. Rather than being forced to compromise her principles and the academic standards for her classes, Daly took a leave of absence this spring. In May, the college simply announced that Daly, a tenured member of the faculty, was no longer working for the college _ without her knowledge or consent.

Daly is renowned for her”women-only”courses and her willingness to teach men separately. This is nothing new, nor is it unusual, pedagogically, for a professor to offer separate sections for men and women, people of color and white people, and other groups where the students’ social locations are significant to what is being studied and how it can best be learned.

Not only at Boston College, but throughout the world, men and women often study separately, sometimes for reasons sexist to the core, sometimes for creative pedagogical purposes.

Boston College is attempting to rid itself of Daly right now not because of her women-only classes, but because the college is afraid of the publicly anti-feminist Center for Individual Rights, a right-wing foundation based in Washington, D.C.

Ironically, in its failure to try to find a way to keep and celebrate Daly’s contributions to womankind, the college is demonstrating the ancient truth Daly has taught: that women’s lives just don’t count as much as men’s, not at Boston College, not in the church, and not in a world increasingly controlled by groups like the CIR.

DEA END HEYWARD