Incompatible with God's Design: A History of the Women's Ordination Movement in the U.S. Roman Catholic Church by Mary Jeremy Daigler (review)

Documenting the history of a living social movement is a challenge, but this is what Mary Jeremy Daigler has undertaken in Incompatible with God's Design, the first history of the U.S. Roman Catholic women's ordination movement. Daigler begins with overviews of the controversies regarding women's ordination and of the movement's early American precursors. She continues with the story of the international St. Joan's Alliance, founded in 1911, the first Catholic group on record to advocate women's ordination. Another chapter details the life of Mary Lynch, a leader of the U.S. movement for Catholic women deacons. Lynch's 1974 letter raising the question of women's ordination to the priesthood led to the planning of the first Women's Ordination Conference in Detroit in 1975, and the national organization which it produced.

Other chapters address the role of Catholic sisters in the movement – nuns, we learn, were not the founders of the U.S. movement, as is sometimes believed – and the support for women's ordination from a good number of Catholic priests and bishops. A further chapter explores the history of the Women's Ordination Conference, the national organization at the center of the drive for Catholic women's ordination since 1975.

Daigler's discussion of the influence on the U.S. movement from groups on other continents and the formation of Women's Ordination Worldwide undercuts Vatican claims that the women's ordination movement is a Euro-American phenomenon. It also introduces Roman Catholic Womenpriests (RCWP), an organization launched by the ordination to the priesthood of seven Catholic women on the Danube River in 2002. Today it includes close to two hundred RCWP priests and bishops and the communities they lead. Daigler's concluding chapter lays out the conflicts and ambivalences that dog the U.S. movement as it begins its second century.

Welcome as this pioneering study is, Incompatible with God's Design is not without its problems. These include factual and copy-editing errors throughout. For example, on page 24, the author describes Leonard Swidler as "one of the earliest lay Catholics to earn a Ph.D. in theology." Swidler demands recognition for his leadership in the early women's ordination movement, but a significant number of laypeople (including Mary Daly) received Ph.D.'s in theology from St. Mary's School of Sacred Theology in Indiana before Swidler received his Ph.D. – in history – in 1961. These and other errors are as much the publisher's fault as the author's.

At another level, many will perceive as unfortunate Daigler's decision to devote as many pages as she does to the involvement of Catholic sisters who were not, as she explains, foundational to the U.S. women's ordination movement, and to Catholic priests and bishops, as she devotes to the U.S. Women's Ordination Conference (WOC). Throughout its near-forty year history WOC, with thousands of members, has spearheaded the U.S. movement for women's ordination. But the author warns readers in her preface that Incompatible with God's Design "describes a broad movement and not merely the one organization called 'WOC'" (vii). I join her in hoping that "historians and doctoral students" (viii) will remedy this lacuna and others in the future.