GRAIL MOVEMENT. The Grail movement was begun in the Netherlands in 1921 by a Dutch Jesuit priest, Jacques van Ginneken, and a group of students at the Catholic University of Nijmegen who were among the first Dutch Catholic women to earn university degrees. They were inspired by van Ginneken's vision that Western civilization was in crisis and in need of major changes, arguing that women had never had a fair chance to develop their capacities to the full, in either the church or society, and that women had great gifts with the potential to change the world and move it in a Godward direction. Van Ginneken envisioned a movement of young women, under female leadership, willing to give themselves totally to spreading the kingdom of God, not as nuns in the cloister but as laywomen in the midst of the modern world.

International Developments

By 1936 the Grail...