Women of Vision

Women of Vision is a book that expands significantly public knowledge of the contributions of Catholic laywomen to church and society over the past century. Despite historic advances in women's recognition and equality over the past half-century, the significant roles played by Roman Catholic laywomen in church and society still go largely unacknowledged. With Women of Vision: Sixteen Founders of the International Grail Movement, Marian Ronan and Mary O'Brien contribute substantially to remedying this situation. Founded in the Netherlands in 1921, just after World War I, the Grail movement was focused, from the outset, on using laywomen's extraordinary gifts to resolve the crises in which the world found itself. By 1961, the movement had spread to twenty other countries, including Brazil, Australia, the Philippines and nine African countries. Drawn from interviews done with Grail founders in many of these countries, Women of Vision highlights the relentless and often heroic work done by Grail women, founding and staffing hospitals and schools, supporting indigenous women and girls, preparing local women for church and Grail leadership, and in some cases, assuming governance roles in their own countries and at the United Nations. "The Grail founders whose voices are heard in this volume were and are women of great faith and enterprise. Their stories are invaluable to the history of the movement that inspired them." -Alden V. Brown, author, The Grail Movement and American Catholicism 1940-1975 (1989) Women of Vision tells the story of The Grail through the memories and experience of sixteen of its remarkable leaders, representing efforts on six continents and nearly a century of prophetic wisdom. It is a book which, like the movement it recounts, carries readers compellingly to "the cutting edge" of lay ministry, alongside women who transcend boundaries of geography and culture as they "trust in the Spirit of God, Mystery and Source of Life." -Margaret Susan Thompson, Syracuse University