A Jesuit who wasn’t an alcoholic read the Big Book, heard his own order’s founder in its Twelve Steps, and told Catholics it was good.
“Alcoholics Anonymous is natural; it is natural at the point where nature comes closest to the supernatural, namely in humiliations and in consequent humility.”
In 1940 Father Ed Dowling was a Jesuit priest in St. Louis, on the staff of The Queen’s Work, the magazine of a Catholic devotional society called the Sodality. He walked with a cane, and he was not an alcoholic. The Big Book had come out in April 1939, and within a year or so a copy reached him. Where, and how, is one of the things the tellings in Where he found it disagree about.
What caught his eye was the Twelve Steps. They reminded him of the Spiritual Exercises, a retreat of prayer and self-examination about a month long, set down in the 1500s by St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. Bill W. later called him the first clergyman of his faith to notice “the surprising resemblance.” When Bill admitted he knew nothing about the Exercises, Pass It On says, Father Ed was delighted.
He said so in print, in The Queen’s Work. Bill credited him with “the first Catholic recommendation of A.A. of which we have any knowledge,” written in 1940, and summed up its message in a line of his own: “Folks, A.A. is good. Come and get it.” Lois W. remembered “a splendid review of the book,” and Father Ed recommending AA in many Jesuit communications. It mattered, she wrote, because many Catholic leaders “were dubious about A.A. because of its nonreligious, although spiritual, attitude.”
At home he helped steer drinkers he knew into the program. St. Louis old-timers, Bill wrote, remembered how Father Ed helped start their group, and that it turned out mostly Protestant, which didn’t bother him at all. AA’s newsletter says the group soon drew a visit from Jack Alexander, researching his March 1941 Saturday Evening Post article. By 1945 the city had four groups, and one of them read every newcomer an address of his.
Late in 1940 he went to New York and called on Bill W. Lois W. and Glenn C. say he went to meet him; AA’s newsletter says no one knows whether that was the whole reason. Bill’s side of that night is told in About fifty homes, in Number One Man.
It’s 1940, in St. Louis. Father Ed Dowling is a Jesuit priest on the staff of a Catholic magazine. He walks with a cane, and he isn’t an alcoholic. But a new book has come his way, called Alcoholics Anonymous, and something in it catches his eye.
Its Twelve Steps remind him of the Spiritual Exercises, written in the fifteen hundreds by the founder of his own order, St. Ignatius.
So he says so, in print. Bill W. later called it the first Catholic recommendation that AA knew of. As Bill summed it up: Folks, AA is good. Come and get it.
In St. Louis, some did. Father Ed helped start the city’s first group. It turned out to be mostly Protestant, and that didn’t bother him a bit.
Just where he first found AA, and when that group began, depends on who’s telling it.
Who told it, and when
Five of the six put Father Ed at the start of AA in St. Louis, and the sixth doesn’t mention the city’s group. Past that they part ways: where he first met AA, when the St. Louis group began, and what took him to New York. Here they are in the order each was set down.
The first is a St. Louis member’s, in 1945. Two are Bill W.’s, one as AA’s 1984 biography of him tells it. The others are from a 1992 biography of Sister Ignatia, AA’s own newsletter in 2006 and a 2017 history by Glenn C. Quotations are short excerpts.
“…who really started the St. Louis groups.”
A member of one of the four St. Louis groups of 1945, describing how his group schooled newcomers. On the second of four Thursday nights, it read them an address by Father Dowling. He says nothing about how Father Ed found AA.
“Educational Plan,” AA Grapevine, June 1945.
“…it had turned out to be largely Protestant, but this fazed him not a bit.”
St. Louis old-timers, Bill writes, remembered Father Ed helping to start their group. Bill dates Father Ed’s recommendation of AA, the first by a Catholic that AA knew of, to 1940, but never says where he first met AA. In Bill’s telling he simply turns up at the club in New York one wintry night that year.
Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age (1957), Bill’s history of AA, from the 1955 convention in St. Louis.
“I belong to the Jesuits out there, and we’ve been looking at this book…”
Father Ed’s first words to Bill, as Bill remembered them: he came from the Jesuits in St. Louis, who had been reading the Big Book. Pass It On calls him responsible for founding AA in St. Louis, and puts the visit late in 1940.
Pass It On (1984), AA’s biography of Bill W., quoting his memory of their first talk.
“…happened to visit Cincinnati, Ohio, and read a copy of the Big Book.”
That was in the spring of 1940, she writes. From Cincinnati he went to Akron to find Dr. Bob and the members there, most of them Protestants who had never heard of St. Ignatius. They sent him on to Bill W. in New York. She says nothing about St. Louis’s group.
Mary C. Darrah, Sister Ignatia: Angel of Alcoholics Anonymous (1992), chapter 1.
“It’s never been explained why Father Ed, unannounced, called on Bill so late in the evening…”
AA’s newsletter has him hearing of AA late in 1939, going to his first meeting in Chicago in March 1940, and with a working group in St. Louis by that summer. It dates his visit to Bill November 1940, and doesn’t know whether he came to New York just to meet him.
“Father Ed Dowling — Bill W.’s Confidant and Friend,” Box 4-5-9, August–September 2006.
“…founded the first A.A. meeting there on October 30, 1940.”
He has Father Ed reading the Big Book soon after it came out and going to Chicago to see how meetings worked, then founding the St. Louis meeting and going to New York a month or so later, in late November or early December. Glenn C. draws on his own 2015 biography of Father Ed.
Glenn C., Heroes of Early Black AA (2017), its section on St. Louis.
Where he first met AA
St. Louis’s first group
Going to see Bill
The dates come late
Every telling that mentions the St. Louis group has him there at the start. The rest depends on who is telling it: Cincinnati and Akron, or Chicago; a group working by the summer of 1940, or one founded on October 30. The only two that date the group at all are the newest, written more than sixty years later.
For a closer look
What the Exercises are, how one St. Louis group used his words, and his words in the Big Book.
St. Ignatius of Loyola, a Spanish soldier who became a priest, founded the Jesuits; the pope approved the order in 1540. His Spiritual Exercises take a person through about a month of prayer, a close look at their own conscience and confession, toward a decision about how to live. Every Jesuit makes them.
Bill W. described the likeness twice. Introducing Father Ed in 1955, he spoke of “the surprising resemblance” between the Exercises and the Steps. In his 1957 history he wrote that the Steps paralleled “a part of the Exercises of St. Ignatius” closely in principle. Bill never claimed to have read them, and Pass It On says the priest was pleased to hear he hadn’t.
Mary C. Darrah’s biography of Sister Ignatia tells the meeting another way. In her account Bill told Father Ed flatly that he knew nothing firsthand about the Jesuits and that the Steps had come to him by inspiration. If there was a link to St. Ignatius, she suggests, it ran through Akron, where Dr. Bob worked beside Sister Ignatia.
By June 1945 St. Louis had four AA groups. That month a member of one of them wrote to the AA Grapevine about how his group schooled newcomers: four Thursday nights in a row before anyone counted as a full member.
The first night sketched Bill W.’s story and his trip to Akron. The second took up the spiritual side of the Steps, and then someone read aloud an address by “a greatly revered Jesuit priest,” Father Dowling. The third went through the Big Book, and then a talk by a Protestant minister was read. The last covered the pamphlets, how the group ran and the Twelfth Step. A newcomer who sat through all four got a white membership card; after a year sober, a gold one.
Father Ed’s words still travel with the Big Book. Its appendix “The Religious View on A.A.” opens with him. There is something spiritual about an art museum or a symphony, he says, and the church approves of using them; there is something spiritual about AA too, and Catholic participation in it “almost invariably results in poor Catholics becoming better Catholics.” A footnote, added after he died, records that he died in the spring of 1960.
Earlier, from the ninth printing in January 1946, the book’s dust jacket carried a shorter line of his, AA’s newsletter reports: that God resists the proud and helps the humble, and that the shortest way to humility is humiliation, of which AA has plenty. The newsletter calls it a solid, though unofficial, Catholic endorsement.