Getting Ready to Celebrate St Patrick’s Day – The Blessing of Beer

The period of Lent in the Catholic faith is a time for sacrifice and reflection. it is the solemn Christian religious observance in the liturgical year commemorating the 40 days Jesus Christ spent fasting in the desert and enduring temptation by Satan, according to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, before beginning his public ministry

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, (2290) teaches that “The virtue of temperance disposes us to avoid every kind of excess: the abuse of food, alcohol, tobacco, or medicine. Those incur grave guilt who, by drunkenness or a love of speed, endanger their own and others’ safety on the road, at sea, or in the air. That is, drunkenness is a form of gluttony, and a grave sin. Excessive eating is also gluttony, but we can still eat and enjoy good food. Catholics are taught to be temperate in the consumption of both food and drink. In Day 299 of his CIY podcast titled Respect for Health, Father Mike Schmitz cover four brief paragraphs 2288-2291 on respect for health

While Christian views on alcohol are varied, throughout the first 1,800 years of Church history, Christians generally consumed alcoholic beverages as a common part of everyday life. They held that both the Bible and Christian tradition taught that alcohol is a gift from God that makes life more joyous, they mostly agree on the temperance principle.

Pope Francis famously declared wine a necessity in 2016, and former Pope Benedict XVI celebrated his 90th birthday with a beer and bretzels in August, 2017.

The Benedictio Cerevisiae is included in the 17th-century Roman Ritual. Chapter VIII of the Rituale Romanum, a liturgical manual dated 1614, includes special blessings for almost anything you might use on a daily basis, literally — the chapter is titled “Blessings of things designated for ordinary use.” In it, you will findblessings for cheese or butter, for seeds, for salt or oats for animals, fishing boats, tools used by mountain climbers and, naturally, for beer.

Beer BlessingThe Benedictio Cerevisiae – Blessing of Beer

V. Adiutorium nostrum in nomine Domini.
R. Qui fecit caelum et terram.
V. Dominus vobiscum.
R. Et cum spiritu tuo.

Oremus.
Bene+dic, Domine, creaturam istam cerevisiae, quam ex adipe frumenti producere dignatus es: ut sit remedium salutare humano generi, et praesta per invocationem nominis tui sancti; ut, quicumque ex ea biberint, sanitatem corpus et animae tutelam percipiant. Per Christum Dominum nostrum.
R. Amen.

Et aspergatur aqua benedicta.

English translation
V. Our help is in the name of the Lord.
R. Who made heaven and earth.
V. The Lord be with you.
R. And with thy spirit.

Let us pray.
Bless, + O Lord, this creature beer, which thou hast deigned to produce from the fat of grain: that it may be a salutary remedy to the human race, and grant through the invocation of thy holy name; that, whoever shall drink it, may gain health in body and peace in soul. Through Christ our Lord.
R. Amen.

And it is sprinkled with holy water

Beer, the English Coffeehouse and the Enlightment

Steven Johnson in his Ted Talk Where Ideas Come From argues that the English coffeehouse was crucial to the development and spread of one of the great intellectual flowering of the last 500 years known as the Enlightment. One of the things that made the coffeehouse important was the architecture: a place where people would get together from different backgrounds, different fields of expertise and share. An agora of ideas the focal point of all the day-to-day activity, creating a marketplace of ideas where vigorous debate was encouraged and the best ideas emerged victorious.
In ancient Greece, the agora (/ˈæɡərə/; romanized: agorá, meaning “market” was a central public space in ancient Greek city-states, the best representation of a city-state’s response to accommodate the social and political order of the polis. Antithetical to today’s Big Tech’s social media and AI tools like Google’s Gemini: In 2003 GW Bush proposed to stop the suppression of free speech, hate and division in the Muslim World. Big Tech followed through promising to democratize the world by offering free Internet access. But it quickly carved out silos, monetized hate and division and is developing close-architcture AI tools with predictable results: Pope Francis Laudate Deum is Spot on “29. The ethical decadence of real power is disguised thanks to marketing and false information, useful tools in the hands of those with greater resources to employ them to shape public opinion. .. Artificial intelligence and the latest technological innovations start with the notion of a human being with no limits, whose abilities and possibilities can be infinitely expanded thanks to technology. In this way, the technocratic paradigm monstrously feeds upon itself.”

Johnson also argued that “an astonishing number of innovations…