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AA: the Catholic Connection

© Kathy Shaidle

Last year, Time magazine voted Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson one of the most influential people of the century. Indeed, spiritual writers like M. Scott Peck and Norman Vincent Peale have long predicted, and encouraged, such recognition for Wilson in particular and AA in general.

Even those outside "The Program" sense that AA and its 12 Steps play a vital role in modern spirituality. Few people, however, know about the visionary Catholics who helped AA during its early struggles for recognition and respectability.

Father Edward Dowling Dowling was a Jesuit who first heard about AA in 1940. He traveled to New York to meet Bill Wilson in person. Thus began a life-long friendship, with Dowling acting as spiritual advisor for his new (non-Catholic) friend. Dowling even introduced Wilson to the famous Serenity Prayer, which eventually became the "official" AA prayer.

While not an alcoholic himself, Dowling was well acquainted with pain: he suffered from crippling arthritis. Perhaps that's why he was so impressed by AA's success in helping the chronically ill.

As a Jesuit, he was also struck by the similarity between the 12 Steps and the "Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius" (which of course predated the Steps by centuries.) When Bill Wilson confessed that he'd never heard of the Exercises, Dowling began to suspect that AA must have been divinely inspired.

Father Dowling's praise for AA was printed on the jacket of the Big Book and so helped many Catholic alcoholics overcome their suspicion that AA was somehow "anti-Catholic." Dowling's endorsements continued until his death some twenty years later.

Sister Mary Ignatia Gavin Akron is considered the city where AA was founded. It was there that Bill Wilson met Dr. Bob Smith, another alcoholic, and AA's cofounder. Sister Gavin was the admitting nurse at an Akron hospital. She knew Smith well, having admitted him numerous times as his drinking grew worse.

In those days, alcoholics were shunned by hospitals as pariahs who didn't pay their bills. Dr Smith remembered Sr. Ignatia as particularly sympathetic. After he got sober, Smith asked her to help with the struggling AA. Ignatia eventually convinced hospital administrators that alcoholics were sick people deserving of treatment. Patients remember her with great affection, and Bill Wilson often called her one of AA's angels.

Other Catholics who helped carry the AA message include:

Father Ralph Pfau, the first priest to publicly declare himself a recovering alcoholic. His 1958 articles in Look magazine inspired both clergy and laypeople to seek help.