Researching Donna Steichen

In 1950, she married LeRoy Steichen, and they became the parents of four children.

Before becoming known for her writing, Steichen was a classroom teacher and religious educator, and was engaged in the pro-life movement from its inception. From 1980 to 1986, she served as vice-president and president, successively, of the Minnesota chapter of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

Donna Steichen is best known to the general public for her best selling 1991 book Ungodly Rage: The Hidden Face of Catholic Feminism, a critical analysis of the impact of feminism on American Catholicism. During the 1980s Donna Steichen, like others within the Catholic Church, became alarmed by the manner in which many Church employees, including women religious, were expressing ethical values contradictory to those incorporated in such encyclicals as Casti connubii (Chaste Marriage) and Humanae vitae (Of Human Life). In the turmoil following the Second Vatican Council, many were open to new ideas and seeking untraditional ways to live. Among the main sources of such unorthodox ideas were "New Theology", feminism and New Age neopaganism. In particular, Steichen focused on what she perceived to be linkages between feminism and wicca, or as she commonly refers to it in her book, "witchcraft."

In Ungodly Rage, Steichen argued extremely forcefully that these views were contrary to revealed doctrine and that the dissenters were actually practicing a completely different religion from that taught by the Church. She contended that these heretical notions had been permitted to gain a foothold in American Catholic institutions by the US hierarchy, which was unwilling or excessively slow to investigate those responsible.

The book, her first, was a success. It turned Steichen, who had been writing for a long time in small Catholic journals, into a significant figure in the move to restore orthodoxy within the Church. She became a noted figure on the lecture circuit in North America, England, Ireland, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines. Some have even claimed Steichen as an influence on Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.