The 12 Steps led me back to the Catholic Church

Very early in my sobriety and before I came back home to the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church that Jesus founded, I remember being amazed at the love I saw and felt within the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. The selflessness of its members was something I had never witnessed before and was sure proof of the Divine origin of this program. With my newly awakened awareness of the Divine, I very clearly remember thinking that God had, through AA, created an army of followers that were hidden from polite society and toiled away selflessly in the shadows of society trying to follow His will and help others.

I ran across this piece some years ago and wanted to post it here. The connection between the 12 steps and the Catholic faith had been made early on in AA history by a Jesuit priest, Fr. Ed Dowling, who would become a close friend of AA's co-founder, Bill W.

The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius  and the Twelve Steps

By Bill Creed SJ

      The link between the Exercises and the Twelve Steps are rooted in the early days of Bill Wilson’s development of the Alcoholics Anonymous recovery process. Bill’s relationship with Fr. Edward Dowling SJ of the Missouri Province connected the Exercises and the Twelve Steps. When Dowling and the Jesuits learned that Wilson wrote the Twelve Steps in “twenty or thirty minutes” without much idea about why the order or the wording, they concluded that more was happening than meets the eye. Ed Dowling and other Jesuits saw such a parallel between the order of progress in Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises and in the Twelve Steps that they considered this parallel a special gift of God.

The  Relationship between Bill Wilson and Ed Dowling SJ

      In 1960 Bill Wilson made the following remarks about his relationship with Fr. Ed Dowling SJ. His comments reveal the bond of friendship between Wilson and Dowling, Wilson’s first encounter with Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises, and the response of the Jesuits to AA’s Twelve Steps.

     “Every thoughtful AA realizes that the divine grace which has always flowed through the Church is the ultimate foundation on which AA rests. Our spiritual origins are Christian…In this connection I’d like to tell you the story of my long connection with Father Edward Dowling, whose funeral I have just attended.

      Never shall I have a finer friend, a wiser adviser, nor in all probability such a channel of grace as he personally afforded me over the years. Father Ed, as we affectionately call him, was the first clergyman of the Catholic faith ever to take notice of us AAs. It happened in this way. Our textbook, Alcoholics Anonymous, was published in the spring of 1939. A few months later Father Ed read the book and very evidently liked what he saw there.

      In the Queen’s Work, the magazine of the Sodality, he wrote a piece about us which in effect said to all people of the Catholic faith, ‘Folks, AA is good; come and get it.’ Because we could have had no idea of how the AA book would be received by the clergy, this forthright recommendation brought us great excitement, rejoicing, and gratitude. My first unforgettable contact with Father Ed came about in this way. It was early in 1940, though late in the winter. Save for old Tom, the fireman we had lately rescued, the club was empty…Then the front doorbell rang and I heard old Tom toddle off to answer it. A minute later he looked into the doorway of my room, obviously much annoyed. Then he said: ‘Bill, there is some old damn bum down there from St. Louis, and he wasn’t to see you.’ Great heavens, I thought, this can’t be still another one!’ Wearily, and even resentfully, I said to Tom: ‘Oh well, bring him up, bring him up.’ Then a strange figure appeared in my bedroom door. He wore a shapeless black hat that somehow reminded me of a cabbage leaf. His coat collar was drawn around his neck, and he leaned heavily on a cane. He was plastered with sleet. Thinking him to be just another drunk, I didn’t even get off the bed. Then he unbuttoned his coat and I saw that he was a clergyman. A moment  later I realized with great joy that he was the clergyman who had put that wonderful plug for AA into The Queen’s Work. This was the beginning of one of the deepest and most inspiring friendships that I shall ever know. This was the first meaningful contact that I had ever had with the clergymen of your [Catholic] faith.”

       “Some months later I visited St. Louis and Father Ed met me at the air field. By contrast this was a blistering day, and Father Ed had come to bring me to the Sodality Headquarters in St. Louis. I was struck by the delightful informality. Even then, believe it or not. I still toyed with the notion that Catholicism was somehow a superstition of the Irish!

      Then Father Ed and his Jesuit partners commenced to ask me questions. They wanted to know about the recently published AA book and especially about the Twelve Steps. To my surprise they had supposed that I must have had a Catholic education. They seemed doubly surprised when I informed them that at the age of eleven I had quit the Congregational Sunday school because my teacher had asked me to sign a temperance pledge. This had been the extent of my religious education. More questions were asked about the Twelve Steps.

      Our Twelve Steps were the result of my effort to define more sharply and elaborate upon these word-of-mouth principles so that alcoholic readers would have a more specific program: that there could be no escape from what we deemed to be essential principles and attitudes. This had been my sole idea in their composition. This enlarged version of our program had been set down rather quickly – perhaps in twenty or thirty minutes – on a night when I had been very badly out of sorts. Why the Steps were written down in the order in which they appear today and just why they were worded as they are, I had no idea whatever.

      Following this explanation of mine my new Jesuit friends pointed to a chart that hung on the wall. They explained that this was a comparison between the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius and the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, that, in principle, this correspondence was amazingly exact. I believe they also made the somewhat startling statement that spiritual principles set forth in our Twelve Steps appeared in the identical order that they do in the Ignatian Exercises. In my abysmal ignorance, I actually inquired: ‘Please tell me – who is this fellow Ignatius?’ [National Clergy Conference on Alcoholism, Bill Wilson, 1960]

Dowling’s Parallels between the Exercises and the Twelve Steps

      Dowling had written about some parallels between the Twelve Steps and the Spiritual

Exercises. He thought that the only explanation for such a close link was God’s Spirit. In 1953 he published his awareness of how the two matched up, moving through each of the twelve steps and many of the specific exercises of Ignatius.

     “The first three of the twelve steps correspond roughly with the foundation of the

Spiritual Exercises. In the foundation we see the human person as creature. It recognizes the dependence of the human person on God. AA bases dependence on a rather concrete

specific type of experience – drunkenness. The Ignatian foundation indicates that everything else shall be chosen or rejected in the light of the purpose that grows out of this dependence, ie., sharing God for all eternity by doing God’s will on earth.

      In the Spiritual Exercises, the next thing is the contemplation of sin: sin of the angels, in our first parents, in others, in myself, and sin in its effects. And of course, right along the line there you have the fourth step of AA, a fearless, thorough moral inventory of one’s sins. The parallelism is rather striking.

      To a priest who asked Bill how long it took him to write those twelve steps he said that it took twenty minutes. If it were twenty weeks, you could suspect improvisation. Twenty minutes sounds reasonable under the theory of divine help.

      After a moral inventory of one’s life, all spiritual exercises, Catholic anyway, demand the confession of sins. It is specifically required in the Spiritual Exercises. In the AA fifth step, you have that general confession admitting my sins to myself, to God, and to another human being.

      There are two liabilities when we commit a sin: one reatus culpae, the guilt of sin; the other reatus poenae, the obligation of restitution. The AA sixth and seventh steps cover the guilt of the sin, and the eight and ninth steps the obligation of restitution.

      I think the sixth step is the one which divides the men from the boys in AA. It is love of the cross. The sixth step says that one is not almost, but entirely ready, not merely willing, but ready. The difference is between wanting and willing to have God remove all these defects of character.

      The seventh step implements that desire by humbly asking God to remove these defects. Then comes the reatus poenae,  the obligation of restitution or penance. God’s

forgiveness is sought in the sixth and seventh steps. In the eighth and ninth steps one makes restitution. In the eighth step the alcoholic makes a list of those people one has offended and whose bills one has not paid. In the ninth step one pays off these

obligations, if one can do so without hurting people more.

      The eleventh and twelfth steps give a rather limited parallel to the positive asceticism of Christianity. The eleventh step bids one by prayer and meditation to study to improve one’s conscious grasp of God, asking God only for two things: knowledge of God’s will and the power to carry it out. Now, that is a true and accurate description of the positive aspects of Christian asceticism as well as of the Second, Third, and Fourth Weeks of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.

      Then, the twelfth step. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we carry this message to other alcoholics and practice these principles in all our other affairs. In our apostolic work we should be an instrument in the hands of God.”

[“Catholic Asceticism and the Twelve Steps,” Rev. Edward Dowling SJ, The Queen’s Work, St. Louis MO, 1953]

Other Significant Convergences between the Exercises and the Twelve Steps

      Dowling and presumably other Jesuits in St. Louis found the Twelve Steps to be linked with the Principle and Foundation and First Week of the Exercises. Other significant parallels can be made.

a)   Changes in thinking, choosing, and feeling.

      The Twelve Steps aim at changing the way a person thinks, chooses and follows feelings. The process of the Twelve Steps leads a recovering alcoholic to reassess one’s mindset by shifting to the perspective of wanting what God wants. The process leads a  recovering alcoholic to re-orient one’s will by being open to what God wants. And the process leads a recovering alcoholic to cease using alcohol as a way to avoid facing life. Addiction is rooted in attempts to change one’s unpleasant feelings instead of picking up one’s cross daily with courage. 

      The three key exercises in the Second Week: the Two Standards, the Three Persons, and the Three Modes of Humility invite a retreatant to changes similar to those in the Twelve Steps. After acknowledging one’s sin and God’s mercy, the retreatant is led by God’s Spirit to attend to God’s new invitation, God’s call, to follow Christ in a new way. This call will lead to a re-assessment of the way one thinks, the way one chooses, and the way one responds to one’s feelings.

      In the Two Standards, Ignatius asks the retreatant to understand the differences in the values and attitudes of the Enemy of our Human Nature and of Christ. It is not in the accumulation of riches (possessions), honor (what others think) or pride (self centeredness) but in poverty (acceptance of limitations), humiliations (transparent vulnerability), and contempt (humility) that a retreatant finds peace and joy.  Ignatius understood that responding to the invitation to set aside sinful ways meant first changing one’s way of thinking about life, the world and oneself. Stop thinking that you are what you have and possess, what others think of you, that you are the center of creation. Instead, begin to think Christ’s way of thinking which he outlined in the beatitudes. In AA’s Twelve Steps recovering alcoholics have a saying: “I’ve got to change my way of thinking if I’m going to stay sober.”

      In the Three Persons, Ignatius asks the retreatant to be open to choosing what God wants. He presents three degrees (persons) of openness to doing God’s will, the last degree (person) is the most open, wanting only what God wants. This person lives with a poised freedom. In AA’s Twelve Steps recovering alcoholics have a saying: “if you always do what you’ve always done, you will always get what you’ve always got.” Appeal is made to changing one’s choices.

      In the Three Modes of Humility, or three ways of loving, Ignatius asks the retreatant to continue to make loving choices when it feels painful. In AA’s Twelve Steps recovering alcoholics have a saying: “I’m doing this because my feelings cannot order my steps.” So the Exercises aim to re-orient a sinner’s way of thinking, choosing and avoiding certain feelings.

b) Freedom from and freedom for.

      In fact the very purpose of the Exercises, according to Ignatius in his first Introductory

Observation is to lead a retreatant to a freedom from “inordinate attachments” (Ignatius’

wording), compulsions and obsessions and to a freedom for seeking and doing the will of God. In other words, developing a relationship with their true self, fostering relationships of responsibility and mutuality, and allowing their relationship with God to become central to their lives. This “freedom from” and “freedom for” are operative in all spiritual exercising. Every person has some personal unfreedom, something that drains energy whether it is worry, anxiety, concern about what others think, fears, etc. This unfreedom is energy which is unavailable for right relationship and doing God’s will. The homeless addicts have become so captured by their addiction, that they have lost almost all right relationship with their true self, with others and with God. They have lost their jobs, their families, and their self respect. Their “unfreedom” has begun to take over their life, unlike most others whose unfreedom nags away as a small part of everyday living. The Exercises and the Twelve Steps offer a process and a path to free a person from those realities that are draining of energy and life as well as offering a path to free a person for right relationships with self, others and God.

c)   A Director and a Sponsor.

      One final significant parallel between the Exercises and the Twelve Steps is that both are done on one’s own by trusting in God. Both believe that it is God who leads. The retreatant and the recovering alcoholic have a spiritual director or a sponsor but their task is not to take control. Rather their task is to function as a midwife or usher, encouraging the retreatant and the recovering addict to entrust oneself to God. The director and the sponsor stand on the side, like a coach, while the work is done by retreatant and the recovering addict.

In summary, the Exercises offer a spirituality to seek and find God in all things. But they are particularly suited to those who find themselves caught in addictive behavior which thwarts

many good aspirations. The Exercises offer a path, the path of the Spirit, I would maintain, which leads to freedom, freedom from addictions and compulsions, freedom for loving relationships. The Twelve Steps does the same, in almost the same progressive manner.