How much can you drink tonight? To merriness. From Charles Coulombe's article, Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion, in the most recent Catholic Men's Quarterly:
[T]he view of the Church [with respect to drink] go back to the Book of Proverbs' injunction to give strong drink to the poor and suffering, and St. Thomas Aquinas' dictum that one could drink ad usque hilaritatem--"to the point of hilarity." St. Benedict in his rule ordered that each monk be given a measure of wine a day; in Medieval England, that measure was considered to be a gallon, so English monks must have been quite merry, indeed. It is no wonder that a Benedictine Dom Perignon invented champagne.
But does that mean that a Catholic must guzzle and puff to be a good Catholic? By no means. Strict religious orders give it up save on feast days, or even all together. Many a pious Catholic has "taken the pledge," of perpetual abstinence. But their attitude toward the stuff is totally different from that of the Puritan or the Killjoy. This was summed up for me by an elderly Irishman I met on the Chartres Pilgrimage. Declining my offer of red wine, he said, "No thanks, I've taken the pledge."
"Ah, I said, nodding wisely, "you're a teetotaler."
"I am most certainly not!" he said in great dudgeon.
Confused, my response was, "Um, you've taken the pledge, but you're not a teetotaler. How is that?
"Well, you see, if you take the pledge, you give up a lesser good for a greater. But teetotaling is a filthy Protestant notion, based on the idea that liquor is evil. Is is, sir, the difference between celibacy--and misogyny!"
