CATHOLICS AND TEMPERANCE

...The Calix Society is the Catholic program for spiritual recovery...

...Most groups, however, are concerned about the suffering alcoholic...

...Yet it is this baffling spiritual component, involving both moral accountability and religious faith, that characterizes the unique and successful program of Alcoholics Anonymous...

...We are not speaking here of the virtue of temperance, which allows controlled and judicious use of alcohol, but of the virtue of complete abstinence...

...For a long time the notion was prevalent that inebriety is always morally wrong and that the inebriate is always morally culpable...

...The wife and children of the workingman suffered miserably when he drank up his wages in some ill-smelling saloon...

...If there is a difference between Catholic and Protestant patterns of drinking at the present time it cannot be explained on the cultural fact that drinking behavior varies according to the social class to which the drinker belongs...

...By and large, they preferred wine and beer to hard liquor, and they looked upon these potations as almost staples of their daily diet...

...Bishop Kenrick spoke on abstinence in Presbyterian churches...

...This approach to therapy bothers some professional researchers because it is not subject to quantitative measurement and it is thus "insufficiently scientific...

...Archbishop Ireland was instrumental in founding the National Anti-Saloon League...

...In so far as fundamentalism continues mainly as a non-urban phenomenon it is not likely to affect Catholics who are mainly city people in this country...

...It was established to reshape and reconstruct a spiritually sick Catholic man or woman...

...As Bishop John Keane said in discussing the movement for Catholic total abstinence: "the church of Christ can never ally herself with Manicheism or fanaticism, by teaching that intoxicating drinks are bad in themselves, or that whoever uses them in any way is guilty of sin...

...In his popular travelogue, The Path to Rome, Belloc wrote almost as much about drinking as he did about religion, and sometimes he connected the two, as when he distinguished between Bacchus and the Devil, and warned a young man that "he should never drink what has been made and sold since the Reformation-I mean especially spirits and champagne...

...John Dollard's oft-quoted impressionistic account of class differentials suggests that upper-class drinking is done in a controlled fashion by both men and women while lower-class people, mainly males, tend to lack self-restraint while drinking...

...The famous Frances Willard of the Women's Christian Temperance Union addressed the 1891 convention of the Catholic Total Abstinence Union and invited the Catholics to send delegates to the WCTU meeting in Boston later that year...

...In fact, only sick alcoholics are permitted to join the fellowship...

...This slogan, animated with even greater venom than it had been almost fifty years earlier, was probably responsible in part for the defeat of Alfred Smith, and for the election of the Republican candidate, Herbert Hoover...

...Some years later, the reigning Pontiff, Leo XIII, praised this organization with the words: "We esteem worthy of commendation the noble resolve of those pious associations, by which they pledge themselves to abstain totally from every kind of intoxicating drink...

...The sick alcoholic still has the moral obligation to maintain sobriety...

...Fraternization with Protestants in the temperance movement and elsewhere, especially when it seemed to lead to the "Americanization" of Catholicism about which Leo XIII warned in his letter Testem Benevolentiae,was frowned upon by prominent prelates like Archbishop Corrigan of New York, Bishop McQuaid of Rochester, and the bishops of the Province of Milwaukee...

...The need for moral regeneration inevitably makes the person face the matter of moral culpability...

...They saw the drunkenness of the lower classes in England and Ireland as a social evil that had to be eradicated...

...Poverty and its attendant social evils would be alleviated if poor people could be persuaded, or forced, to stop drinking alcoholic beverages...

...This focus on the drinking problem itself, and not on the religious and political affiliation of drinkers, was later to become a central principle of the Alcoholics Anonymous fellowship...

...Besides the implied preference for Catholic (pre-Reformation) over Protestant (post-Reformation) patterns of drinking, Belloc may not have been aware that his distinction between fermented and distilled alcoholic beverages also reflected the thinking of the earliest temperance advocates in England, Ireland and the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries...

...Other comparative research has been done across denominational lines and it demonstrates that among American males, Catholics have a higher proportion of drinkers than do Protestants...

...There are those who look upon it as a kind of religious sect, a "new revivalism," but it can in no sense be termed an ecclesiastical or organized religion...

...Thither the laborer and the mechanic bring their hard-earned dollars, only to find themselves penniless when demand for work slackens...

...In the heat of the arguments between continental and Irish immigrants, between abstinent Protestants and drinking Catholics, between those who favored and those who opposed legally enforced prohibition, it is sometimes forgotten that the great majority of those who "took the pledge" were neither heavy drinkers nor alcoholics...

...member comes to believe in and depend upon a higher Power which most of us call God...

...Catholics had relatively high proportions of both drinkers and heavy drinkers...

...When the American Surgeon General warned against "ardent spirits" he was not talking about wines...

...If alcoholism is an illness, is the alcoholic likely to insist that he is not morally culpable for his drinking performance...

...Finally, "Archbishop Messmer of Milwaukee forbade any priest visiting in his Archdiocese to deliver addresses in favor of prohibition or under the auspices of the Anti-Saloon League...

...The substance of this notion is that "those who become alcoholics possess a physiological allergy to alcohol such that their addiction is predetermined even before they take their first drink...

...The friend to whom he had given this advice drank whisky one day and the consequence was that "he had to take some nasty pledge or other to drink nothing whatever and became a spectacle and a judgment, whereas if he had kept his exact word he might by this time have been a happy man...

...Let him (said I) drink red wine and white, good beer and mead-if he could get it-liqueurs made by monks, and, in a word, all those feeding, fortifying, and confirming beverages that our fathers drank in old time...

...While the pledge was taken by many people, both Catholics and Protestants, who had a "drinking problem," the great majority of members of both the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Catholic Total Abstinence Union were not "reformed drunks...

...Church affiliation always has implications for moral behavior and the great leaders of temperance movements, Catholic and Protestant, were always deeply preoccupied with the morality of drinking...

...The power and influence of these three organizations culminated in the ratification of the eighteenth amendment to the United States Constitution in 1919...

...Joan Bland's Hibernian Crusade recounts that an Irish Temperance Society existed in Boston from 1835...

...Similarly it may be said that the "misapplication" of the ethical concept of alcoholism will tend to lessen the importance of bio-medical and psychological therapy in the treatment of alcoholics...

...Unfortunately, however, the contemporary notion seems to be that the pledge is only for people who cannot handle their liquor...

...Perhaps more typical were the objections laid down by Bishop John Fitzpatrick when Father Mathew mingled with Protestants and addressed a large open meeting on the Boston Commons...

...Catholics, however, do not fit exactly these neat categories...

...The Ulster Temperance Society in 1829 declared it a "plain dictate of common sense" that fermented wines be approved and retained as a "customary beverage" but that people ought to refrain from distilled liquor like brandy, whisky and gin...

...American Catholics now are generally well distributed throughout the class structure (with the obvious exception of ethnic enclaves like Chicanos, French-Canadians and Puerto Ricans...

...If Ireland's rhetoric did seriously imply a disease concept of alcoholic overindulgence, it was much more extensive than the carefully worded medical definition now in use...

...Most experts in the field of alcoholism, as well as a small but increasing number of the general public, now appear to be moving away from moral condemnation of the alcoholic to an acceptance of alcoholism as a disease...

...This notion, that physicians could prescribe alcoholic beverage for reasons of health, was soon dropped from the pledge, and it became less and less tenable as the concept of complete abstinence grew stronger...

...brandy, nor sparkling wines, nor absinthe, nor the kind of drink called gin...

...The Catholic temperance groups kept their own identity and formed their own separate national association, the Catholic Total Abstinence Union, in Baltimore, in 1872...

...The suggestion here, which seems to call for further research testing, is that Catholics tend to avoid both "extremes," that of complete abstinence and that of excessive drinking...

...The original Mathew pledge, taken over from Quaker William Martin, contained the phrase "except used medicinally, and by order of a medical man...

...They are not old-time prohibitionists, condemning the evils of drink in the populace, nor a temperance society persuading people to stop drinking...

...Archbishop Purcell once said that he enjoyed very fine health during the decade when he was totally abstinent, as though to testify that good health does not really suffer when one stops drinking...

...The fact that ingestion of alcohol is dangerous, and ultimately fatal, to the confirmed alcoholic does not mean that the person who drinks regularly is the same as an alcoholic...

...He was concerned about his immigrant countrymen...

...Catholics were never convinced that drinking is immoral, but they recognized the practice of abstinence as a spiritual virtue of self-denial that helped them to lead a better Christian life...

...As the movement gained strength and proliferated in large numbers of temperance societies, it switched its emphasis from voluntary abstinence to a prohibition movement that would call upon the government to outlaw the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages of all kinds...

...The spiritual philosophy and the personal comradeship of Alcoholics Anonymous have deliberately avoided any attempt at a political organization, a national reform movement, or a formal affiliation with any religious denomination...

...Yet, there were some exceptions...

...Catholic Drinking The "noble" experiment of national prohibition has come and gone but the genuine question of temperance, that is, moderation in the use of alcoholic beverages, continues among the American people...

...Residential location combines with other variables in the sociological attempt to "explain" American drinking patterns...

...The striving for spiritual reconstruction still confronts the person who suffers from an illness that is widely considered chronic and incurable...

...Jellinek suggests that it was only in the nineteenth century that this "new approach" began to take hold and that the disease concept of alcoholism increasingly attracted the attention of the medical profession...

...Very few of their number took the pledge- the break with tradition would have been too great-but they strongly recommended their overseers and free servants to do so, and at times provided facilities for enrolling their slaves...

...Cahalan found that "the proportion of abstainers was relatively high among those who attended church most frequently," and those who stay away from church are morely likely to be drinkers...

...The overwhelming majority of these exiles were facing a hard struggle in the land of their adoption, and there was grave danger of them falling victims to the evils of drunkenness...

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...As sociologists are wont to say, various factors have accounted for the "status enhancement" of the Catholic population, and Gusfield also remarks that the "socialization of each succeeding generation reduces the importance of abstinence as a symbol differentiating the respectable middle class from the non-respectable drinkers...

...A second important distinction is between those religious fundamentalists who believe that it is sinful to imbibe alcoholic beverages in any form, and the great majority of Western Christians who believe that there is nothing immoral in the moderate and proper use of alcohol...

...If this finding is confirmed in future studies, it will support the perennial Catholic teaching of genuine moderation, or temperance...

...there energy is paralyzed and idleness consecrated...

...fellowship...

...Paul Kaunitz, a practicing physician more interested in therapy than in causality, opposes the concept of alcoholism as an illness, but he praises Alcoholics Anonymous as "the single most effective agent for the management of those alcoholics who recognize their addiction and desire help...

...Ten years later, in 1894, Bishop Watterson of Columbus, Ohio, promulgated a diocesan law excluding liquor dealers and saloon keepers from membership in Catholic societies or associations...

...When Matt Talbot died in Dublin his reputation for saintliness and sobriety quickly spread to the United States where a Matt Talbot Legion was instituted by the Carmelite Fathers...

...Their wholesale distribution of barrels of beer provided needed income for the maintenance of their apostolic ministry, and they had the consent of the Holy See to operate a brewery...

...Relatives and friends are more ready to sympathize with a sick person than with an immoral person, but for the alcoholic himself there remains the obligation to take the necessary steps to "arrest" the illness...

...Abstainers also tend to score high on the index of religious fundamentalism, an index which is hardly applicable to American Catholics...

...The opposition to the Catholic Abstinence Union came much more strongly from another direction, that of the continental immigrants who did not share the Anglo-Irish preoccupation with alcoholic beverages...

...For example, there is a higher percentage of abstainers among rural and small town Protestants than among urban and suburban Catholics and Jews...

...If, on the other hand, alcoholism is morally and socially reprehensible is the society likely to insist that the alcoholic be arrested and punished for intoxication...

...It is quite likely that a condescending attitude of this kind informed the early Anglo-Irish promoters of a temperance movement that would selectively allow them the genteel pleasures of fermented wines while condemning the lower classes for their excesses in the use of distilled spirits...

...Calix is the "handmaid" to Alcoholics Anonymous...

...Sickness evokes sympathy...

...CATHOLICS AND TEMPERANCE JOSEPH H. FICHTER The general Catholic attitude toward alcohol If there is a general Catholic attitude toward the drinking of alcoholic beverages it is probably reflected in the doggerel verse attributed to the late English convert, Hilaire Belloc: Wherever a Catholic sun doth shine There's always laughter and good red wine...

...This involves again old questions about epidemiology and the biological and hereditary factors of alcoholism that are still not satisfactorily answered, but it helps to alleviate moral condemnation...

...A half-century later this concept of differential status drinking was noted when a Catholic plantation owner in Louisiana welcomed the famous Father Mathew to live and preach among them but did not embrace the virtue of abstinence...

...The moralist, John Ford, pointed out that "although the alcoholic may be powerless over alcohol and unable at times directly to resist the craving for drink, yet it is within his power generally speaking, to do something about his drinking...

...Sin is met with condemnation...

...He strongly emphasized his belief that "the average alcoholic is sick in body, mind and soul, and usually cannot stop drinking without outside help...

...Blaine lost that election to Grover Cleveland, but the same anti-Catholic slogan was resurrected when the Catholic governor of New York became the Democratic candidate in the presidential campaign of 1928...

...Perhaps this point still needs to be clarified by making a sharp distinction between drinking and alcoholism...

...Liberal Protestants showed a pattern of drinking that was remarkably close to that of the Catholics as regards proportions of drinkers, but with fewer heavy drinkers...

...She would like a priest, but they must be sure to send a woman too...

...The concern about deepening the spiritual phase of continued sobriety led to the establishment of the Calix Society in 1949 by a small group of Catholic alcoholics in Minneapolis...

...Intoxicants create a morbid appetite, the tyranny of which is increased by each indulgence, until it becomes a disease that defies the control of reason and will...

...The great majority of Americans who drink, even those who are daily or heavy drinkers, are not afflicted with alcoholism...

...The same survey found that "among all groups except Catholic men, those who went to church every week had materially fewer heavy drinkers...

...One of the interesting findings on American drinking habits is that "a bi-modal drinking pattern is more typical of native American Protestants than of first- and second-generation Americans, both Catholics and Jews...

...Father Mathew's apostolate of total abstinence, which began among the poor people of Ireland, brought him to America for two and a half years...

...There was no question of competition with, or separation from, the A.A...

...practically no full recovery from alcoholism has been possible without this all-important faith...

...The appearance of fellowship between a Catholic priest and such men can hardly be without evil results...

...The Total Abstinence Union had its vocal opponents among the Catholic population...

...It is a veritable epidemic" and it was doing more harm than that done previously by the black plague, the yellow fever and the Asiatic cholera...

...The propaganda of the temperance movement, and especially of the Anti-Saloon League, was pointed at the uplift and reform of the drink-sodden working class...

...There, fortunes are wrecked, the ruin of which precipitates embezzlements and fraudulent bankruptcies...

...Cahalan and his associates in a recent national survey found that one-third of Catholic men are "heavy drinkers" as compared to 23 percent of liberal Protestant males, and 13 percent of conservative Protestant males...

...The platform was also covered by sectarian fanatics, Calvinistic preachers and deacons and other such who also made their speeches...

...By virtue of their religious convictions the Protestant temperance people were non-drinkers...

...At mid-nineteenth century the observation was made that upper-class Episcopalians and lower-class Catholics were both permissive of drinking because neither group accepted the middle-class Protestant ideology...

...In the Irish-American population the proportion of heavy drinkers is much higher among liberal Protestants than among Catholics...

...In his vehement denunciation of the "evil of intemperance," John Ireland turned to medical terms in calling drunkenness a disease, a malady, an epidemic...

...If the Irish could not practice moderation, let them take pledges, but let them not trouble their stronger brethren with such eccentric ideas...

...This is not to say that the poor drink more, and the wealthy less, or vice versa...

...The temperance crusaders generally seemed to focus on the plight of the poor urban Irish Catholic Americans...

...At the present time there are, of course, many "teetotalers" in the American population, and there is a complex of motivation for the personal decision to abstain totally...

...Alcoholism is a psychogenic dependence on or physiological addiction to ethanol, manifested by the inability of the alcoholic consistently to control the start of drinking or its termination once started...

...While this was definitely a Catholic organization, its members resolved "not to recognize each other as Protestant or Catholics, nor as Whigs or as Democrats, but as temperance men, and temperance men only...

...This discredited national experiment and the whole crusade to abolish alcoholic beverages have been so thoroughly labeled Protestant that relatively little attention has been given to the temperance movement among American Catholics...

...Most American Catholics (as well as Jews and Episcopalians) were opposed to the establishment of federal prohibition...

...Gusfield argues that we cannot understand the history of the American temperance movement unless we place "liquor, beer and wine in the context of social classes, ethnic cultures, and different life styles...

...The notion that there is here a spiritual illness, a "sickness of the soul," falls strangely on the ears of most medical and psychological researchers...

...The general craving for alcohol in the population at the present day has, by long and continuous indulgence, become a deep-seated malady, and no longer a controllable appetite...

...but not whisky, nor father JOSEPH H. fichter, S.J., teaches in the Sociology Department of Loyola University in New Orleans...

...The so-called "heresy" of Americanism was only peripheral to the Catholic temperance movement, but the church leaders who were supposedly guilty of this heresy also happened to be staunch supporters of total abstinence...

...This tolerant and ecumenical spirit was apparently shared only by some of the top leaders in the temperance movement...

...The Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884 admonished those Catholics who sell intoxicating liquors and urged that they adopt "a more decent method of gaining a livelihood...

...Tensions between Catholics and Protestants were heightened, and cooperation on temperance concerns was made less likely, during the presidential election campaign of 1884...

...the first convention of the Catholic Total Abstinence Union of America coincided with the national convention of the Prohibition Party and the two groups exchanged courteous greetings...

...Nearly every A.A...

...Different from Anglo-Irish immigrants, the continental immigrants, both Catholic and Lutheran Germans, and later Italians, Poles and Slavs, frequently exhibited annoyance at the efforts of temperance, abstinence and prohibition groups...

...As late as 1954 Ford observed that the disease concept of alcoholism "has not met with universal acceptance...

...Much of the stigma of alcoholism, if not the ultimate responsibility for excessive drinking, has been lessened by the widespread propaganda about the so-called "allergy concept" of alcoholic addiction...

...The large German-speaking community "could see no reason to add to the commandments of God and the Church any alien Puritan excrescences...

...The membership is fully aware that personal responsibility does not permanently disappear under the shadow of illness, and yet they confess freely that "we were powerless over alcohol-that our lives had become unmanageable...

...The crusade of middle-class Protestants for total abstinence from alcoholic beverages got its organized start in Boston in 1826, under the tutelage of clergymen like Lyman Beecher, William Lloyd Garrison and William Channing...

...National surveys on religious practices reveal consistently that Catholics attend religious services with greater frequency than do Protestants...

...The criteria of social status include not only income and education but also ethnicity and religion, especially among the varieties of peoples who came to the United States...

...One of the obstacles seen by the fervent Catholic abstainers was the fact that the Benedictine monastery at Latrobe, Pennsylvania, had a flourishing business of making and selling lager beer...

...As the threat of legal prohibition loomed larger during the first world war, more and more Catholics became alarmed...

...The Catholic Total Abstinence Union, which was largely "Hibernian," has been replaced by various temperance groups which still accept non-drinkers into membership...

...Aside from socio-economic class, however, ethnicity was also a criterion of status differentials in drinking patterns...

...The masses of poor people in Ireland were Catholics, but it was their socio-economic status rather than their religion that differentiated their drinking habits from those of upper-class Irish Protestants...

...He is therefore responsible for taking the necessary means to get over his addiction...

...Sobriety, emotional control, industry and punctuality-and whatever else went into the so-called Protestant Ethic- were understood to be middle-class American virtues...

...In A.A...

...It was at this time that a Presbyterian minister, Reverend Burchard, spoke in favor of the Republican candidate, James G. Blaine, and declared that the antecedents of the Democratic party had been "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion...

...Because of persistent anti-Irish, anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiments among nativist Americans, Catholics generally held aloof from the strongly Protestant temperance movement...

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...The sole purpose is the maintenance of sobriety of the individual with the cooperation of Divine Power and with the ready mutual support of fellow members...

...Jellinek himself said that the "misapplication" of the disease concept of alcoholism "will tend to weaken the ethical basis of social sanctions against drunkenness...

...The historical-and questionable-explanation of the drinking habits of American Catholics on the basis that they represented the poor working classes of this country is no longer tenable...

...this proportion was not much higher than for less-than-weekly Catholic men church-goers, but was materially higher than for all other groups...

...Among Catholic men there was a slightly higher proportion of heavy drinkers among the weekly churchgoers...

...When this is related to alcoholic beverages one may expect that the frequent church-goers tend to be abstainers...

...The National Prohibition Party became a political reality in Detroit in 1867, the Women's Christian Temperance Union came into being in 1874, and the Anti-Saloon League was formed in 1896...

...Nor are any direct ties formed with any existing social welfare programs...

...When Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in 1935, one of its earliest supporters was Jesuit Father Edward Dowling who helped to start the first A.A...

...Their clergy generally "had not the slightest objection to a workingman's enjoying his glass of beer on Sunday in a saloon or in a beer garden...

...The Anglo-Irish members of these "moderation" societies were not only chiefly Protestants, they were also members of the more advantaged ranks of society...

...The bi-modality implies that both abstainers and hard drinkers are more numerous among Protestants than among non-Protestants, where the moderate drinker is the more frequent case...

...Compassion for the poor and underprivileged was certainly a factor among the crusaders for temperance...

...They did not consider their drinking habits in need of reform, and they generally resisted the nativist, middle-class attempts to impose prohibitory restraints upon them...

...As the temperance groups moved even closer to total legal prohibtion German Catholics saw it as a threat to their beer gardens...

...Heavy drinkers, as defined in this study, are those who "drink nearly every day with five or more [drinks] per occasion at least once in a while, or about once weekly with usually five or more per occasion...

...The saloon is the prime source of all this pauperism and of all its attendant social evils...

...It has been a long time since Catholic immigrants, both Irish and continental, composed the "huddled masses" of poor and underprivileged people who gave so much concern to the prohibitionists...

...At least, I've always heard it's so, Benedicamus Domino...

...As the mood and aim of the reform movement changed from temperance to abstinence to prohibition, American Catholics inaugurated more temperance groups than abstinence groups...

...Religion and ethnicity are still among the criteria of social status but they no longer draw the sharp lines they once did between Catholicism and Protestantism...