Chapter 2 The Queen’s Work and

The Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary was considered a dying organization when Fr. Lord took over. It was made up of a scattered network of Catholic student groups at Jesuit schools, devoted to prayer and charitable work. Fr. Lord used a revitalized version of the sodality magazine, The Queen’s Work, to quickly raise the membership to two million members. It affected nearly every Catholic school in the United States. The magazine gave instruction in Catholic doctrine and pushed for the evangelization of non-Catholics. Fr. Lord wrote songs and poems and put on plays and musical pageants in addition to publishing a long series of educational pamphlets, with titles like “The Call to Catholic Action” and “When Sorrow Comes—Reflections on the Problem of Pain and the Mystery of Suffering and Sorrow” in 1935, “Atheism doesn’t make sense” and “They’re Married! AKA Christian Marriage AKA Catholic Marriage” in 1936, and later (in 1938) “Prayers Are Always Answered.”⁴⁹ One can see instantly both how this fit in with the developing interests of young Fr. Dowling, and also how fascinated he would become when he read the A.A. Big Book shortly after its publication and noticed how it was focusing on so many of the same kinds of topics.

Father Larry Chumminatto said he was visiting Father Ed in his office one day, when the priest opened the middle drawer of his desk and drew out a children’s toy cap pistol. He fired two loud bangs, and a young woman suddenly appeared at his door. He asked her to bring him several items, and then explained to Father Chuminatto that this was their temporary device until they got the office buzzer system fixed.⁵⁴

As was noted earlier, Father Ed had tried out for a couple of major league baseball teams in 1916, when he was seventeen,⁵⁵ and he continued to enjoy watching baseball games in his later years. In the Spring of 1950, after going to a game at Cardinal Park with a newspaper sportswriter, he commented the next day:
Baseball wastes more time than any other sport. Last night I took a stop watch out and timed the minutes they wasted winding up, fouling off pitches, etc. I am going to write some new rules and … see if they will work. Then I am going to send the results to the commissioner.
Instead of the old traditional American rule of three strikes and four balls, Fr. Ed wanted to speed up the change of batters by reducing the count to two strikes and three balls. For the sake of television coverage, he also proposed taking the regulation baseball diamond and “squeezing it in from the sides,” so the speak, so that the distance across the diamond transversely from third base to first base would be much shorter than the vertical distance from home plate to second base. In that way, a single television camera placed behind home plate would be able to show all the action going on at all of the bases simultaneously without having to pan back and forth. Such was the power of his persuasive tongue, that he actually talked some amateur players into playing a game that way, and then sent his proposals to the U.S. baseball commissioner, who was not however so easily persuaded to change the old rules!⁵⁶

Father Ed’s love affair with the cross: humility as the willingness to be crucified if necessary in the battle against evil. He loved people, and he loved being with people. Yet he did also have his quiet times. He began every morning by celebrating the eucharist at the St. Louis College Church, and then would sit afterwards in the sacristy and silently contemplate the crucifix on the wall. Only after this quiet time would he go to the telephone and start arranging his day’s business.⁵⁷

At the beginning of his career as a Jesuit, when he had finished his two-year novitiate, and had taken his permanent vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, he had taken the name Dismas as his vow name.⁵⁸ This was, according to later Catholic tradition, the name of one of the two thieves who were crucified on either side of Jesus: the good thief, who prayed to Jesus and was rewarded with Jesus’ eternal blessing. See Luke 23:39-43 (in the old Roman Catholic Douay-Rheims translation):

This vision of what was truly meant by the virtue of humility was one that Dowling successfully imparted to Bill Wilson during the 1940’s and early 1950’s. We can see it coming out powerfully in 1953 in Wilson’s chapter on Step Seven in Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, where the whole chapter turns into a description of the virtue of humility as the tool which we can use to remove all our other shortcomings.

His weight rose to 242 pounds (110 kg). He would sometimes gorge himself in grotesque food binges: doing things, for example, like eating a quarter pound of butter and an entire box of saltine crackers at one sitting. Once he started on one of these binges, he was unable to make himself stop. One night, to give another example, he came into the kitchen and ended up eating all the strawberries that had been prepared for the entire Jesuit community. He became so deathly ill he had to be given the last rites.⁶¹

Trying to go on diets did not work. The other Jesuits joked about it, because he would carefully eat the items on his restricted diet, but then end up consuming as much in “extra helpings” afterwards as he had eaten before he tried going on the diet.⁶² Or it would take place in the reverse order: first the almost oblivious, blind bingeing, and then sitting down and eating the carefully limited diet meal. Mary Wehner, who was on the staff at The Queen’s Work, told of an incident she observed at one of their staff buffet dinners.
I happened to be standing next to him (Father Ed) at the buffet table watching a group square dancing. As we stood there completely absorbed, Father Ed would take a piece of bread, slap a piece of ham on it, fold it over and gulp it down. This happened several times, maybe five or six.

I said, knowing he was notorious for being oblivious to what he ate, “Oh, Father, why don’t you let me get you some decent food?”

“No thanks, dear, I’m on a strict diet.”⁶³
All of this had a terrible effect on his heart and arteries. In 1952 he had a retinal stroke that left him unable to read, and by 1958 (the year he turned sixty) he had had one or two more strokes and finally, at roughly the beginning of August in that year, a heart attack, which required him to carry a portable oxygen tank with him wherever he went. He finally got his weight down to 167 pounds by November 1958, but it was too late to do much good. A year and a half later, in Memphis, Tennessee, he had another heart attack and died.⁶⁴

The conversion of Heywood Broun: One well known newspaperman of that period was Heywood Broun, who was famous for his defense of the underdog and the liberal positions he took on the social issues of the day. He believed that journalists had a duty to campaign against societal injustice, especially when it was the government itself which was supporting the evil doers. In 1933 he helped found the American Newspaper Guild, a labor union for journalists (it is still in existence, and currently has 32,000 members all over North America). The Guild still sponsors a Heywood Broun Award to be given annually to the journalist who does the most to help right a public wrong.

He was a member of the famous lunch group called the Algonquin Round Table in New York City, along with famous literary figures Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, and Robert Benchley, and was also close friends with the Marx Brothers (the famous comedy team from early twentieth-century vaudeville and movies).

Broun had published numerous attacks on conservative Christian political and ecclesiastical figures who, he believed, were denying people’s civil liberties in their attempt to prevent the publishing of certain kinds of things: this included anything on topics they regarded as obscene, anything on the use of birth control devices, or anything defending the drinking of alcoholic beverages. As a 1939 Time magazine article put it, “To many a U. S. churchman, Heywood Broun was a Red, certainly a freethinker, probably an atheist.” But then he began talking to Fr. Dowling, and as Broun put it in a column he wrote in March 1939,
Quite recently I talked to a newspaper friend of mine who is now a priest. I said to him that I wanted to know if there was anything in Catholicism which stood in the way of any person who believed in political and economic progressivism. And my friend smiled and answered: “Don’t you realize that you’re a little naïve, Heywood? You like to call yourself a radical, but the doctrines of the Church to which I belong imply so many deep changes in human relationship that when they are accomplished—and they will be—your own notions will be nothing more than an outmoded pink liberalism.” Whenever the Church militant begins to march there is no force in the armaments of dictators which can stay its progress.⁶⁵

Broun was received into the Roman Catholic Church at the end of May 1939. Father Dowling had successfully made his convert,⁶⁶ by making it clear to him that he did not need to sacrifice his dedication to righting social wrongs in order to be a good Catholic.

Any kind of organization which Bill W. devised for Alcoholics Anonymous would be subject to the same human limitations, which was why Father Ed warned him, “Leadership should be on tap, not on top.”⁶⁸ Guards against tyranny needed to be built into the A.A. structure at every possible point, because just as was the case in all other human institutions, those in A.A. who were given power would sometimes fall prey to the temptation to run roughshod over everyone else.

The radically democratic nature of A.A.’s organizational structure and its Twelve Traditions has long been noted. Some have pointed to the influence on Bill W. and Dr. Bob of their childhood memories of the New England town meeting. But certainly of even greater importance was the fact that the majority of the Protestants in early A.A. came from denominations (Congregationalists, Baptists, and so on) which practiced a pure congregationalist church polity (a method of church government in which each local church congregation is independent and autonomous from all the others, making its own decisions about the way in which matters of faith and practice are to be interpreted within its own congregation), or (in many other cases) they came from denominations such as the Presbyterians which were governed by a hierarchy of committees in which no single person was given any great amount of power for more than a limited and non-repeatable term of office.

But in addition to all this, we must not ignore what must have been the powerful influence of Fr. Dowling’s spirit on the way Bill W. organized A.A. The movement’s radical protection of the rights of minority groups went far beyond anything seen in New England town meetings or Protestant church organizations. It was the protection of small minority groups (black people and so on) and powerless groups (like factory workers or married women who had to stay home and care for numerous small children) which was at the focus of all Fr. Dowling’s political involvement, and something which would automatically have come up every time he and Bill Wilson got together.

One of the most famous self-help groups which he devised was directed toward married couples. In American Catholicism in the 1940’s there often tended to be a rather Jansenistic attitude toward marriage: strait-laced, ridden with rigid rules, and filled with enormous fears about experiencing physical pleasure. In 1947, the German psychiatrist Karl Stern, who had immigrated to Canada and converted to Catholicism, was invited to speak to a Christian Family Movement convention, where he spoke quite strongly on this issue: “A great number of Catholics,” he said, “have toward sexuality a strange, puritanical attitude; a Manichean attitude of fear as though the flesh in itself was something evil or dirty.” (Manicheism, we remember, was an ancient non-Christian religious movement which proclaimed that the only way the human spirit could be saved was through an extraordinary denial of the human body and its needs and desires, including the practice of complete sexual abstinence.) Even though official Church doctrine condemned that kind of false teaching, “it is very prevalent. The strange thing is that the child in contact with a mother who has this kind of inner attitude towards sexual morality, even long before a conscious awareness of sex, is imbued with (the same attitude).”⁶⁹

Fr. Dowling decided to become involved in a counter-campaign, one designed to bring more love and less fear into Catholic marriages, by founding the Cana Conference marriage enrichment program. He set up the first gathering in St. Louis in or before 1942, and devised the name for the program. The word “Cana” of course referred to the story of Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding feast described in John 2:1-11, but Dowling turned the word into an acronym which stressed the idea of a fellowship of mutual support involving devoted Catholic men and women: C-A-N-A = Couples Are Not Alone. He talked about all this in a letter which he wrote to Bill Wilson in 1942, explaining how “he had started a national movement for married couples to help each other through the twelve steps.” He used the twelve steps to help them with their theological, intellectual and psychological problems, as well as scruples and sexual compulsions.⁷⁰ The basic format was to bring these married couples together for a one day conference involving three talks and a group discussion based on inquiries drawn from a question box, followed by a ceremony in which the couple renewed their wedding vows.⁷¹

When Cardinal Samuel Strich (the Archbishop of Chicago) appointed Father (later Msgr.) John Egan to head the Cana program in Chicago—a position he held from 1947 to 1948—Egan became a major leader in the movement. Because of his personality, drive, and public prominence, he came to be better known than Fr. Dowling in many parts of the United States.⁷²

But Fr. Dowling never ceased his work for the movement, using the twelve steps to give Cana conferences for families at least once a month from 1942 until his death in 1960 (in fact, it has been calculated that he put on more than 300 conferences during that period). Sometimes he doubled up on Cana and Alcoholics Anonymous, such as on April 29, 1947, when he was the principal speaker in the morning (at the Hotel Tallcorn) for the third anniversary celebration of the A.A. group in Marshalltown, Iowa, and then led a Cana Conference meeting for Catholic couples that afternoon.⁷³

And in fact when he died, we remember, it was the morning after meeting with one of the Cana groups he had established, a group of devoted Catholic couples in Memphis, Tennessee. Right after his death, Monsignor DeBlanc, who was the director of the Family Life Bureau of NCWC (the National Catholic Welfare Council, today the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops), sent a wire saying simply but eloquently: “Fr. Dowling's death an irreparable personal loss.” Monsignor Egan, the aforementioned director of Chicago Cana, telegraphed a similar message: “Our debt to him for what he was and what he did will never be repaid.”⁷⁴

In Bill W.’s letter to Fr. Ed of May 20, 1946, he talked about how impressed he was with the way the Cana marriage conferences worked within the context of the Catholic Church. Although A.A. had had informal family groups meeting in some cities since 1941, one still cannot help but wonder if the example of the Cana Conference movement might not have helped inspire Lois Wilson when she joined with Anne B. in setting up a more formal Al-Anon Family Groups organization in 1951.⁷⁵

The Queen’s Work and its Summer School of Catholic Action: Fr. Dowling was a well-known member of the faculty of the Summer School of Catholic Action for over twenty-five years, traveling to around twenty-five cities in the United States and Canada, and speaking to large audiences. This was one of the most influential nationwide endeavors carried out by the famous Jesuit leader Fr. Daniel A. Lord, who had revitalized The Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary and its magazine The Queen’s Work when he was appointed director in 1925.⁷⁶
In these stops across the country at big city hotels, The Queen’s Work staff offered young people talks, discussions, and liturgies. Father Dan Lord directed their singing and dancing in his large musicals. Dowling himself gave talks on social justice, marriage, the family, proportional representation, suffering, A.A.—whatever his current interest.⁷⁷
Fr. Ed especially liked to show how the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius could be applied to dealing with the everyday stresses of family life.⁷⁸ But as one of the other staff remembered, he did it with a light-handed style, reminiscent of the way a good newspaper columnist would talk: “He would speak from current newspaper ‘clippings,’ which he would have in his hands in seeming disorder, and all of this ‘stuff’ was spontaneous and bristled with one liners.”⁷⁹

Large numbers of young American Catholics—the best and brightest of their generation—had their earliest exposure to good Catholic thought at these summer schools, and were inspired to dedicate their lives to serving the Church as clergy, religious, or enthusiastic lay people.