“I believe there is a priesthood of husband to wife and wife to husband.”
Two by two
On December 7, 1941, the day of Pearl Harbor, Father Ed was walking along a street in St. Louis, afraid that his city’s young AA group would drink over the news as so many of his friends already had. A member sober less than a year fell in beside him and talked mostly about AA. Asked how he could say nothing about Pearl Harbor, the man answered, as Bill W. told the story twenty years later: “Each and every one of us in AA has already had his own private Pearl Harbor.”
Three weeks later Father Ed spent New Year’s Day with Bill and Lois W. at Stepping Stones, their new house north of New York City. He wrote to Bill afterward to thank Lois for “seconding your efforts” to make it “one of the happiest I’ve ever spent.” In February Bill asked him to become a trustee of the Alcoholic Foundation, AA’s board. He asked his provincial, the head of his Jesuit province, who told him that a post that important would need a bishop. And when rumors in Cleveland about the founders’ royalties on the Big Book left Bill wondering whether to take them at all, it was Father Ed who told him to; Legacy, in By the Carload, tells it.
He thought married couples could help each other the way alcoholics did. In 1942, AA’s newsletter Box 4-5-9 says, he started the Cana Conferences: days of talks and discussion for husbands and wives. Cana was the wedding feast in John’s Gospel; the newsletter spells the name out too, as “Couples Are Not Alone,” and says he spoke at a Cana Conference once a month, using the Twelve Steps, for the rest of his life. Who started Cana is less certain than that (see Go deeper).
In St. Louis, on January 24, 1945, five Black alcoholics formed the AA-1 Group, which Glenn C. counts as the first Black AA group anywhere. That October their secretary, Torrence S., wrote to New York that a compromise had kept them out of the white meetings but let them start their own. Glenn C. believes Father Ed “undoubtedly played an important role” in winning even that much. Nothing on hand says what he did.
Fulton and Grace Oursler, friends of the Wilsons, had introduced Bill to Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen, the radio priest, who offered to explain Catholicism to him. By the fall of 1947 Bill was going to him on Saturdays, as he would for the better part of a year, and writing to Father Ed about it. Their letters are set out in Letters, 1947.
It’s December 7, 1941, the day of Pearl Harbor, on a street in St. Louis. Father Ed Dowling is worried. Many of his usually sober friends have already taken to the bottle over the news, and he’s afraid his young AA group will do the same.
Then a member, sober less than a year, falls in beside him and talks mostly about AA. Father Ed asks him how he can say nothing about Pearl Harbor.
The man is surprised he has to ask. “Each and every one of us in AA has already had his own private Pearl Harbor,” he says. Why should an alcoholic crack up over this one?
In these same years Father Ed takes the Twelve Steps to married couples, in the Cana Conference. And when Bill W. takes Catholic lessons, Father Ed answers his letters, and, as Bill said later, never once asks him to join his church.