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)
