While celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, let’s not taint our hope for heaven due to excessive drink

(LifeSiteNews) — While Christendom celebrates the feast of Glorious St. Patrick, the fifth century Apostle to Ireland, two competing images can come to mind: 1) the wonders of the great saint who was instrumental in bringing an entire people at the “ends of the earth” to salvation in Jesus Christ, and 2) for some, an image of excessive drinking that, as the saint would affirm with the Church, can actually amount to a deadly sin and cost one their eternal salvation.

But let’s not be prudish or in any way scrupulous. Healthy consumption of alcoholic beverages, including Guinness Irish Stout, in proper moderation is not only permissible but even culturally affirmed by Our Divine Lord who changed water into wine at the Wedding Feast in Cana.

As Aristotle taught and St. Thomas Aquinas affirmed, the use of alcohol or other goods God has given us in moderation reflects virtue and thus a proper means to a happy disposition and overall life.

The drunken ‘Paddy’ image originated in British propaganda

But following what many historians have argued, the image of heavy drinking being a part of Irish culture, originates in 19^th-centruy British racial or ethnic propaganda used to justify their colonial rule of the island through a type of dehumanization as well as in the U.S. to support nativist or anti-immigrant campaigns.

For example, one historian explains how the Victorian “Paddy” image, including being an alcoholic, was explicitly racial propaganda rooted in “English anxiety over the Irish independence movement and the rise of pseudo-Darwinian racial science.”

They portrayed the Irish as “a separate race, closer to our primate cousins than to humans” with “violent, ignorant, drink-prone” traits in “countless Victorian cartoons.”

And historian Jeet Heer went on to explain that “Like radioactive material, an ethnic stereotype can possess a lengthy half-life, lingering on long after the period of its most deadly potency.”

Thus, for some, or perhaps many, the Feast of St. Patrick may include the inertia of this ethnic stereotype and serve as a temptation that to properly observe this celebration one ought to over-indulge in alcoholic beverages.

Yet, for classical Catholic Ireland, nothing could be further from the truth.

As St. Patrick himself would warn in one voice with the Catholic Church founded by Jesus Christ, one may lose even their eternal salvation due to deliberately drinking in excess.

Drunkenness ‘serious business,’ a mortal sin

As the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) teaches, for a sin to be mortal, its object is grave matter and is committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent.

Elaborating further, the CCC’s Compendium stipulates the effects of mortal sin in the following way: “This sin destroys charity in us, deprives us of sanctifying grace, and, if unrepented, leads us to the eternal death of hell” (395).

And since the Church has always taught that some acts are intrinsically grave and mortal due to their very nature, when they are chosen with sufficient knowledge and freedom, we are all able to turn ourselves from God by committing such acts deliberately.

One such act is intentionally drinking to excess, impairing one’s governing faculty of reason by violating the virtue of temperance, which “moderates the attraction of pleasures and provides balance in the use of created goods.”

The CCC directly cites sacred scripture in demonstrating how the written word of God affirms drunkenness to be a mortal sin:

Now the works of the flesh are plain: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the Kingdom of God (Gal. 5: 19-21, my emphasis).

Yet, if drunkenness results from grave matter but lacks full knowledge due to cultural normalization of such behavior, or sufficient consent due to addiction, peer pressure or the like, the sin may be venial or less imputable to the individual.

However, the CCC is sure to stipulate that “Feigned ignorance and hardness of heart do not diminish, but rather increase, the voluntary character of a sin” (1859).

Finally, habitual drunkenness also risks predisposing an individual to further compounding sins due to the violence it exacts upon one’s dispositions and the loss of grace that assists one in avoiding further sins, which always have as their effect, some level of destruction to the individual, his or her relationships, and the broader community.

Christians may never despair of God’s mercy

As one priest in my memory once preached, sin is “serious business,” and yet, as Christians we may never despair of God’s mercy as we strive to evermore become the person He has created us to be, through prayer, the sacraments, study of the faith and the ongoing practice of the virtues.

For this reason, Jesus Christ, the Savior of the World, instituted the ordinary means of forgiveness through the Sacrament of Penance or Reconciliation, which Pope St. John Paul II emphasized “is not only an instrument aimed at destroying sin … but also a valuable exercise of virtue, which is itself expiation, an irreplaceable school of spirituality, and a highly positive process for the regeneration of souls.”

Guinness Irish Stout as a foretaste of heaven

Thus, as we celebrate the Feast of St. Glorious Patrick, let’s avoid the inertia of 19^th century dehumanizing stereotypes but rather celebrate with great gratitude the wonders worked by God through His Apostle to the Irish people, and the life of grace it brought all Christians through Jesus Christ the Eternal Son of God, that we may strive toward perfection and becoming the person He created each of us to be.

And in doing so, I personally recommend one, or perhaps two, Guinness Irish Stouts, in such moderation that it is a foretaste of the Heavenly Feast of the Lamb, without compromising our steps along the path to this exalted final destination in the love of the Holy Trinity.

For further edification of this feast, one may read an excerpt from the Confessions of Glorious St. Patrick here.