
NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
At 10 a.m. on June 19, 1855, an anxious Father Boniface Wimmer, O.S.B., sat in a Vatican antechamber, awaiting an audience with Pope Pius IX.
A German Benedictine priest, Father Wimmer had immigrated to America almost 10 years earlier. Upon his arrival, at the invitation of Pittsburgh’s Bishop Michael O’Connor, he founded America’s first Benedictine monastery, St. Vincent’s Abbey.
Like all German abbeys, St. Vincent’s raised its own crops, ground its own flour, and brewed its own beer.
O’Connor-didn’t mind the crop growing or flour grinding, but as an early adherent of the temperance movement, he was none too pleased with the beer-brewing. After reflecting upon the scandal of monks in his diocese brewing (and selling) alcohol, he decided the best course of action was to order them to stop. The Benedictines obeyed, but then they pled their case to Rome.
Once Wimmer’s audience began, he explained to the Holy Father that, out of obedience, the monks had drunk nothing but water since they ceased brewing. He then added, “Whether we can keep it up is another question.”
The pope agreed, saying, “Water alone would never do on a permanent basis.”
The two men reached a compromise: the monks could brew beer for themselves but would avoid the retail trade for a time. The monks abided by the decision, and, when they later resumed distributing beer, they sold only small amounts.
Even that compromise, however, proved insufficient. As the temperance movement grew in popularity, increasing numbers of the Catholic clergy and hierarchy in America criticized the monks. One Buffalo-area priest even devoted a series of pamphlets to the infamous “beer monks” of St. Vincent’s.
“Instead of laboring for the cause of sobriety, on which the welfare of the church in this country so greatly depends,” he wrote, “the beer monks…are actually gaining revenue from the spread of intemperance.”
The monks stopped selling beer in 1898, then, following Prohibition, closed the brewery for good.
Today, they sell coffee instead.
