Can the Twelve Steps be
compared to the Spiritual Exercises of St.
Ignatius?
Answer
In 1941, I visited St.
Louis and Father Ed Dowling met me at the field.
This was a blistering day and he had come to
bring me to the (Jesuit) Sodality Headquarters.
I was struck by the delightful informality. Of
course I had never been to such a place before.
I had been raised in a small Vermont village,
Yankee style. Happily there was no bigotry in my
grandfather who raised me but neither was there
much religious contact or understanding. So here
I was in some kind of a monastery. 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 A.A.
book and especially about AA's 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
AA's Twelve Steps. I explained how a few years
earlier some of us had been associated with the
Oxford Groups; that we had picked up from these
good people the ideas of self-survey,
confession, restitution, helpfulness to others
and prayer, ideas that we might have got in many
other quarters as well. After our withdrawal
from the Oxford Groups, these principles and
attitudes had been formed into a word-of-mouth
program, to which we had added a step of our own
to the effect "that we were powerless over
alcohol." Our Twelve Steps were the result of my
effort to define more sharply and elaborate upon
these word-of-mouth principles so that the
alcoholic readers would have a more specific
program: that there could be no escape from what
we deemed to be the 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 have no idea.
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 appear in the same order that they
do in the Ignatius Exercises.
In my abysmal ignorance, I
actually inquired, "Please tell me - who is this
fellow Ignatius?"
While of course the Twelve Steps
of Alcoholics Anonymous contain nothing new,
there seems no doubt that this singular and
exact identification with the Ignatius Exercises
has done much to make the close and fruitful
relation that we now enjoy with the Church. (The
'Blue Book', Vol.12, 1960)
