She reported on a “prairie fire from hell”: Author Donna Steichen dies at 97

The year was 1985. A nun in a zip-up velour robe was demonstrating liturgical dance at my all-girls high school. Spotlighted onstage in the darkened auditorium, she swayed and bowed, long grey hair falling to her waist, feet bare. The performance was punctuated with mostly forgettable snippets of wisdom focused on Mother God and patriarchal structures.

But one unforgettable moment came at the end of her performance, when she asked, “What is God’s greatest gift to woman?” With one voice, my schoolmates shouted back, ‘MEN!’”

The same year, Donna Steichen sat demurely on the sidelines of a conference in Mankato, Minnesota, as women circled a smoking cauldron.

Many of the participants were current or former Catholic nuns. They had spent the weekend discussing women and spirituality; this service “in the Dianic Wiccan tradition” was a highlight of the event.

Never mind that the smoke rising from the cauldron was dry ice; the women were deadly serious as they invoked the four directions to send malevolent thoughts to Washington. Their object: to kill a certain bill that was making its way through Congress.

“Mom was sitting on the sidelines with her tape recorder and her notebook, writing down everything she was observing and hearing,” Steichen’s daughter Laura Berquist recalls. “The facilitator of the workshop was not happy. She came over to Mom and told her that everyone was required to participate.

“My mother smiled at her and said, ‘No, I am perfectly happy sitting right here watching.’ She stayed right where she was with her tape recorder on, and she went on taking notes. Mom was not a person who was intimidated.”

That incident, Berquist said, perfectly illustrates the feisty spirit that made her tiny, ladylike mother—who died Oct. 21 at 97—a force to be reckoned with.

The 1991 book that came out of the Mankato conference and similar events was instrumental in exposing the radical feminist infiltration of the Catholic Church in America.

That infiltration was in full flower in the 1980s, when things were getting really weird at my high school, run by the Incarnate Word Sisters. When I read Steichen’s book a few years later, it put many things in perspective for me.

Defecting in place

A mother of four from Minnesota, Steichen had been active in the pro-life movement, Catholic religious education, and other causes before a speech by Catholic feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether impelled her to investigate what Berquist called “the heresy and malevolence” behind Ruether’s radical position.

A gifted artist, Steichen had realized early on that she could do one thing well, along with raising her children: paint or write. She decided she could do more for the Church by writing, so write she did, publishing in her diocesan newspaper and writing pro-life pamphlets. From 1980 to 1986, she served as vice-president and then president of the Catholic League in Minnesota. She also had a long-running local television program, which she used as a platform to defend life and discuss Catholic issues.

But Ruether’s keynote address at Minnesota’s International Women’s Year meeting in 1977—explicitly identifying feminist theology as a branch of Marxist liberation theology—marked a new focus.

It led Steichen to devote a dozen years to researching and writing about feminism and, in particular, Catholic involvement in the feminist spirituality movement. In the process, she uncovered ties to Marxism, abortion, paganism, and the occult.

Her research culminated in Ungodly Rage: The Hidden Face of Catholic Feminism, published by Ignatius Press in 1991.

The book was “groundbreaking,” Berquist told me, “because it exposed the intention of the feminist movement to ‘defect in place’.”

“Mom was attending international woman’s year conferences, and she was dumbfounded to hear these various ladies say so explicitly that they were opposed to the Church and her doctrine, but that they would not leave the Church. Rather, they would try to dismantle her from within.”

Secular feminists had in large part become less strident by the 1980s, Steichen observed. But religious feminists—often well-funded by their religious orders—were a last holdout. They saw themselves as “change agents, engaged in a ‘long march through the institutions’” that [would] change the church to conform to their new vision,” Steichen wrote.

Steichen was careful to quote exact words and tried to back them up with written documentation that said the same thing. The radical feminists she was investigating “hated her,” Berquist remembers, but “they couldn’t do anything about it, because she was so careful about sticking to the observed facts and the written word.”

When she was refused entrance to conferences she was covering, Steichen took to wearing a wig and using her maiden name on her press badge.

She reported from the Mankato conference, “There were tee shirts and bumper stickers bearing the slogans ‘I (love) the Goddess’ and ‘Ankh if you love Isis.’” Elsewhere, she spotted “advertising buttons with such messages as ‘Nothin’ Says Lovin’ like Something From the Coven.’”

And “despite the unanimous denial of any association between witchcraft and satanism, an advertisement for a series of five ‘altar posters’ included two depicting ‘the God,’ a horned and bearded male figure indistinguishable from traditional images of Satan.”

‘A prairie fire from hell’

Although she spiced her reporting with humor, Steichen was clear-eyed about the evils she was exposing and their consequences.

“Catholic feminism is sweeping across the American Catholic Church like a prairie fire from hell,” she wrote. As agents of change, Catholic feminists were remarkably successful in subverting parishes, liturgies, and parochial education, she said.

Even worse was the damage wreaked by a movement that was all about “overthrowing the structure of the family and society,” as she told Catholic World Report in 2011.

“Most people interpret [feminism] as meaning that you’re for women, or that you believe women have a right to be educated or are just as smart as men,” she told CWR’s Jim Graves. “But that’s not what it is about at all.” Marx and Engels “saw that the family was at odds with their vision of society … you can’t change society unless you get rid of the family.” And what better way to get rid of the family than to remove mothers from the home.

Steichen saw a whole constellation of negative effects surrounding the push to move mothers from home to the workplace, including abortion, contraception, divorce, poverty, and ultimately damage to societal and religious institutions.

“To view the devastation all at once is almost overwhelming,” Steichen wrote. “Where, we ask, are our shepherds? How could God let this happen?”

She answered her own question in a typically blunt manner: “The immediate disorders are not God’s doing. They follow from the encounter between religious revolutionaries who reject authority and ecclesiastical leaders who decline to exercise it.

” … Because those designated to guard the truth have allowed error to spread unchecked, it has grown and metastasized to its current catastrophic proportions.”

Ungodly Rage was a surprise hit, and over the next 35 years, Steichen was a sought-after speaker on the international lecture circuit. She contributed to numerous publications, including Catholic World Report, Latin Mass, and LifeSite News.

She wrote and edited two more books, both published by Ignatius. 1999’s Prodigal Daughters: Catholic Women Come Home to the Church was a hope-filled follow-up to Ungodly Rage, with portraits of seventeen women of the Baby Boom generation who left and returned to the Church.

And 2009’s Chosen: How Christ Sent Twenty-Three Surprised Converts to Replant His Vineyard, included profiles of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Steven Mosher, and Joseph Pearce, among others.

The pro-life movement continued to be a fundamental priority for her. “Throughout her life, Donna was a tireless advocate for social reform, especially in defense of the defenseless,” daughter Peggy O’Reilly said. “She used her gifts as a writer and public speaker to promote the rights of the unborn, the handicapped, and the elderly.

“Never reticent to point out error, and always zealous for truth, Donna wrote with clarity and conviction on a wide range of issues bearing on human life, Catholic theology, catechetics, education, and especially pro-life policies.”

Steichen continued writing and speaking into her 90s. As recently as July, she was a guest on Berquist’s “Light of Faith” podcast, discussing as eloquently as ever the role of women in today’s world—a role that, she says, goes far beyond “living as an eminently successful man.”

Surviving

The last section of Ungodly Rage is titled “How Can We Survive as Catholics Until Order is Restored?”

Steichen’s solution: the Rosary, homeschooling, and faithful Catholic education.

She and her husband, LeRoy (who died in 2022 at age 99), were early supporters of Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, California, sending their daughter Laura to the Great Books school when it opened in the fall of 1971. Ultimately, they would send three children and 15 grandchildren to the school, which currently counts two Steichen great-grandchildren as students. Son-in-law Paul O’Reilly currently heads the college.

“She fully believed that education that respects the meaning of truth under the guidance of the Catholic Church was and will always be the antidote for moral and intellectual decline,” Peggy O’Reilly said.

“Donna was one of Thomas Aquinas College’s first unofficial PR spokesmen. Through articles, speaking engagements, and word of mouth, she advocated for the classical liberal arts Great Books program at the college. She always said she would have loved to attend if only it had come along earlier.”

Steichen became a fervent supporter of the homeschooling movement as well. She “kept suggesting to us that we homeschool our children,” Berquist wrote last year. “I am forever grateful to my mother for guiding us in that direction.”

Steichen wrote the introduction to Berquist’s “Designing Your Own Classical Curriculum” in 1994. The following year, Berquist founded Mother of Divine Grace homeschool, which would become a nationwide program to support homeschoolers with online classes, counselors, and lesson plans.

Emerging from the catacombs

Almost 40 years after the publication of Ungodly Rage, faithful Catholic education—Steichen’s antidote to the raging wildfire of feminist, Marxist-inspired influence in the Church—is booming, even as public school enrollment continues to decline.

Mother of Divine Grace now enrolls more than 2,500 families. The homeschooling organization and others like it support over 3.4 million homeschoolers in the United States today.

Meanwhile, hundreds of Catholic classical schools are forming young students in truth.

Students from these twin traditions are filling Catholic colleges, graduating, and contributing to a rebirth of Catholic family life as they marry and raise families of their own.

It would seem that faithful Catholic life is coming out of “the catacombs,” as Steichen put it.

Catholic author and philosopher Carrie Gress read Steichen’s book in the 90s. “It was an eye-opener,” Gress said, “and helped me understand the terrible trends in the Church at that time.”

Gress has written extensively about feminism, which she has called “more harmful than Communism.”

Her books include The Anti-Mary Exposed: Rescuing the Culture from Toxic Femininity (2016), The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us (2023), and Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused With Christianity, published in January.

But she said when she re-read Ungodly Rage in 2016, “I was so wonderfully surprised that everything she wrote about was all but gone.”

“The radical leftism, the women wanting to be priests was so uncompelling and so sterile, that it had simply dropped off the map in most places.”

More relevant than ever

But just a decade later, Gress says that “some of it is resurfacing again.”

As evidence, she points to an Oct. 18 feature in the Chicago Tribune, running to more than 5,000 words, titled “What the Church Needs to Be: Women Defy the Catholic Hierarchy to Become Priests.”

“Much of this is because of the confusion about feminism in the Church today,” Gress said. “I suspect we will see more of it as time goes on if the Church continues to waver on the question of feminism.”

That makes Ungodly Rage more relevant than ever, she said. “Being familiar with what Steichen wrote is a great place to start to help women from falling back into this trap.”

Berquist agrees. “I frequently run into young Catholics, often young Catholic parents, who didn’t know that the Church had a position on Sunday Mass attendance or contraception. They didn’t have the most fundamental doctrines of the Church taught to them in their Catholic schools or religious education programs.”

For those Catholics and ex-Catholics, the book “explains how we got to this place. And shows what we need to do for the future,” she said.

Steichen’s approach was to “stay and fight,” rather than leave the Church in discouragement. The advice she gave three decades ago is still valid, she said in July. In fact, “the situation is even worse—much worse,” she warned, citing the “grave peril” to the family posed by transgender ideology.

The valiant woman

Speaking on the Light of Faith podcast, Steichen’s voice was strong, despite her failing health. She was characteristically witty as she discussed a variety of topics, from motherhood to abortion to Amy Coney Barrett.

Berquist introduced her mother—her voice catching—by comparing her to Scripture’s “valiant woman”: “A woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. Give her of the fruit of her hands and let her works praise her in the gates.” (Proverbs 31: 30-31)

“My, there’s nobody I’d rather be compared to than the valiant woman of Proverbs. Now, perhaps, I should just say goodbye,” Steichen quipped.

When Donna Steichen said her final goodbye last week, Regina Magazine commented simply, “A great woman has passed.”

Read original article