Donna Steichen is a Roman Catholic author and journalist. Born in Wadena, Minnesota to Margaret (Corcoran) and Maurice Merrigan, she lived most of her life in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and later in Ojai, California.

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 and controversial 1991 book Ungodly Rage: The Hidden Face of Catholic Feminism, a critical analysis of the impact of feminism on American Catholicism

Catholicism

Catholicism is a broad term for the body of the Catholic faith, its theologies and doctrines, its liturgical, ethical, spiritual, and behavioral characteristics, as well as a religious people as a whole....

. 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

Casti Connubii

Castī Connūbiī was a papal encyclical promulgated by Pope Pius XI on December 31, 1930 in response to the Lambeth Conference of the Anglican church. It stressed the sanctity of marriage, prohibited Catholics from using any form of artificial birth control, and reaffirmed the prohibition on abortion...

(Chaste Marriage) and Humanae Vitae

Humanae Vitae

Humanae Vitae is an encyclical written by Pope Paul VI and issued on 25 July 1968. Subtitled On the Regulation of Birth, it re-affirms the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church regarding married love, responsible parenthood, and the continuing proscription of most forms of birth...

(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 was surprisingly successful for a conservative religious writer's first book. 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

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

, Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines. Some people have even claimed Steichen as an influence on the increasing crackdowns under Pope John Paul II

Pope John Paul II

Blessed Pope John Paul II , born Karol Józef Wojtyła , reigned as Pope of the Catholic Church and Sovereign of Vatican City from 16 October 1978 until his death on 2 April 2005, at of age. His was the second-longest documented pontificate, which lasted ; only Pope Pius IX ...

 and Pope Benedict XVI

Pope Benedict XVI

Benedict XVI is the 265th and current Pope, by virtue of his office of Bishop of Rome, the Sovereign of the Vatican City State and the leader of the Catholic Church as well as the other 22 sui iuris Eastern Catholic Churches in full communion with the Holy See...

 in the years since the book's publication.

Other writings

Before Ungodly Rage, Steichen published a thirty-five page pamphlet titled Population control goes to school in 1988.

Since the publication of Ungodly Rage, Donna Steichen has edited a second book titled Prodigal Daughters: Catholic Women Come Home to the Church, published in 1998. In this book, Steichen helps document seventeen baby boomer

Baby boomer

A baby boomer is a person who was born during the demographic Post-World War II baby boom and who grew up during the period between 1946 and 1964. The term "baby boomer" is sometimes used in a cultural context. Therefore, it is impossible to achieve broad consensus of a precise definition, even...

 women who were brought up Roman Catholic but gave up their faith, only to return later in their lives.

Though well received, the book was not as controversial as Ungodly Rage, but in the 2000s, Steichen acquired a higher profile with writings in better-known journals such as Catholic World News, Latin Mass

Latin Mass

The term Latin Mass refers to the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Mass celebrated in Latin.The term is frequently used to denote the Tridentine Mass: that is, the Roman-Rite liturgy of the Mass celebrated in accordance with the successive editions of the Roman Missal published between 1570 and 1962...

, LifeSite, Voices and Touchstone

Touchstone

A touchstone is a small tablet of dark stone such as fieldstone, slate, or lydite, used for assaying precious metal alloys. It has a finely grained surface on which soft metals leave a visible trace.-History:The touchstone was used in ancient Greece...

. Her most recent book is ""Chosen: How Christ Sent Twenty-Three Surprised Converts to Replant His Vineyard, published by Ignatius Press
in September 2009.

Criticism

Steichen's Ungodly Rage is light on both traditional theology and feminist theory, but heavy on speculative and specious claims regarding both. She makes a series of unsubstantiated claims, beginning with a conflation of "feminism" with misogyny ("The truth is that feminists don't like women, and they don't want to be women,". Continuing to slide down the slippery slope, she follows one unsubstantiated claim with another, as "witchcraft" becomes a natural extension of feminism: "Feminism appears to be the bait, moral disintegration the hook and the occult the dark and treacherous sea into which the deluded are towed." But most troubling is her refusal to engage with the questions she raises in a rigorous and intellectual way: If female religious really are leaving the Catholic Church in droves, why are they? What are the systemic causes that are driving women to seek alternate forms of spirituality and/or to critically reevaluate their faith? Why is the Church no longer providing religious and moral sustenance to women? Steichen's phenomenally reductive answer to these questions is simply to blame the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. But there are remarkably few serious theologians or scholars of the Church who would agree with her; the consensus is that, if anything, Vatican II failed to modernize the Church enough.