In retirement, she is remaining Director of Catherine of Siena College at the University of Roehampton and is writing fiction.

She was born in 1955 in the northern part of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, nowadays Zambia, to Scottish Presbyterian parents and lived there for eighteen years, attending the Dominican Convent School in Lusaka.

[2] In retirement from active academic research, Beattie has focused on her "first and lifelong passion – to write fiction".

[2] She wrote regularly for the Catholic weekly, The Tablet, and The Guardian newspaper, including an eight-part series on Thomas Aquinas.

[11] The theologian issued a statement rejecting accusations in deviating from the doctrinal truths of the faith as based on serious distortions of her theological position through use of selective quotations out of their context.

The theologian was told it was because she had been a signatory to a letter in The Times arguing that Catholics could support same-sex marriage in good conscience.

She claimed the lay Catholics have the right for a "more reasoned and nuanced public dialogue" about same-sex marriage.