In the course of his parish work, Dowling gets entangled with parishioners and fellow priests who end up being involved in murder either as victims or suspected killers. Father Dowling is one of the lead characters in this series.
The series is based on a popular TV series aired between 19. I just happened to be around.Father Dowling is the main character in a mystery series by Ralph Mclnemy. "I really haven't done anything," Father Dowling once said. From society matrons in mink coats to Skid Row drunks, people came from around the country to pay homage. He was an old-school priest, made of the kind of fine cloth that prefers to disguise itself as sacking. I was closer to him than to any other human being on earth." "He was the greatest and most gentle soul to walk this planet. "Father Ed, an early and wonderful friend of AA, died as this last message went to press," Wilson wrote in the spring of 1960. The two became devoted, life-long friends, with Father Dowling in the role of spiritual advisor. He climbed the stairs to the second floor in spite of the chronic pain in his leg, rather than make Wilson come down to him. The maintenance man who let him in took him for a bum. In 1940, he arrived unannounced at Bill Wilson's walk-up flat in New York. He applied the AA principles to his own compulsive tendencies to overeat and smoke. His tone was matter-of-fact and friendly. Noting the similarity of AA principles - surrender to a Higher Power, rigorous honesty, a daily examination of conscience to Ignatian spirituality, he applied them to the sacrament of marriage and founded what would come to be known as Cana Conferences. When a drinking friend from Chicago lost his wife, Father Dowling took him to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, in those days a fledgling organization. In his work to honor the black community, he used his genealogical skills to locate the previously unmarked grave of Dred Scott. He once took to using a cap gun to summon his secretary when his desk buzzer was broken.
He embraced the cross of daily life with good cheer, a kind word, a sense of humor. Upon being ordained in 1931, he became associate editor at The Queen's Work, the magazine of the Jesuit-sponsored Sodalities of Our Lady in Saint Louis - a post he held until his death.įather Dowling's religious leanings can be discerned from a widely-circulated quote from a piece in the Chicago Daily News dated July 28, 1941: "The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it." Starting in 1929, he studied theology at Saint Mary's College in Kansas. While there, he was diagnosed with the arthritis from which he would suffer crippling pain for the remainder of his life. Though not himself an alcoholic, he was a close friend and spiritual advisor to Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.Īn avid baseball player and newspaper reporter, Father Dowling entered the Jesuit seminary at Florissant, Missouri, in 1919. Father Edward Dowling (1898-1960), the oldest of five born to a devout Irish Catholic family from Saint Louis, became a beloved Jesuit priest.