Friday, May 30, 2008
Pope Benedict XVI Loves His Beer
It is not clear from this press clipping whether the Holy Father actually ordered 185 gallons (!) of this German beer for his household or whether it was delivered as a gift from the brewery. Either way, it appears that Pope Benedict XVI loves his beer. God bless him!
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6 comments:
I want to have a beer with the Holy Father. My friends and I toast to him every time we enjoy a beverage.
What a great idea. Prost! To the Holy Father. I'm going to start doing that... or drink to a saint.
I will also show this article to my wife. She sees the number of empties in the recycle bin and starts to furrow her brow over my level of consumption. In reality, I might average one every day. Okay, one-and-a-half. But I haven't been really drunk in literally decades.
Now I can say, "But honey, the Pope orders beer by the hundreds of gallons.".
Tim, you could also tell your wife that a standard ration of beer for monks and nuns during the Middle Ages was one gallon per day. Obviously over-consumption of alcoholic beverages is a real problem for certain folks, but our Protestant-Puritan heritage in this country generates some rather wacky phobias about drinking. As is well known, in many countries (such as our Holy Father's native Germany) it is customary to have beer or wine with lunch and dinner every day. And there is a pretty considerable body of scientific research that shows that moderate consumption of alcohol (moderate being 1-2 drinks per day for women, 2-3 for men) brings a variety of positive health benefits. I'll be posting in the future about what I call the "New Temperance Movement", inaptly named because, like the first so-called Temperance Movement, it's really about pushing for total abstinence, not temperance. But Catholicism is all about moderation in all things. Your rate of consumption sounds pretty moderate.
I read somewhere - it may have been filling out an insurance form - that one drink a day constitutes "heavy" drinking.
????????
Yup. And when I was a kid they used to talk about one drink a day as the threshold for being an alcoholic. So then, by that wacky criterion, entire nations of people are all alcoholics. This defies good common sense and is just not helpful.
But you know, I've given the Puritans a bad rap. I had a sneeking hunch when I wrote the comment above that I was wrongly deploying that word. And, sure enough, the actual Puritans were not teetotallers (link). The roots of Prohibition and the strange hangover (pun intended) our society still bears from it had its roots in Protestant Methodism, not Puritanism.
"This defies good common sense and is just not helpful."
That, or we're a bunch of drunks.
;-)
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