Can I Get Drunk and Still Be a Good Catholic?

Somebody asks this every weekend, usually around the third drink. Can I get drunk as a Catholic? Is buzzed okay? Where exactly is the line?

Most people expect one of two answers. The church-lady answer: alcohol is basically a sin with a cork in it, and holiness smells like sparkling water. Or the bro-Catholic answer: Jesus literally made wine, Chesterton wrote drinking songs, lighten up. Both answers are wrong, and the real one is better than either, because the real one comes with a ruling and a reason.

The tradition is embarrassingly pro-wine

Start with what nobody expects. The Bible does not treat wine as a regrettable loophole. It treats wine as a gift. The Psalms thank God for bread, oil, "and that wine may cheer the heart of man." Sirach says it flat out: "Wine drunken with moderation is the joy of the soul and the heart." ¹

Then there's the wedding at Cana. The first miracle Jesus ever worked, the opening move of his public life, was turning roughly a hundred and fifty gallons of water into wine, at a party, after the guests had already been drinking. The steward's review: "thou hast kept the good wine until now." ² The Church has never lived this down and has never wanted to. She puts wine on the altar every single day.

So no: the tradition is not puritan about alcohol. Whatever the line is, it is not at sip one.

The ruling

Now the other edge. St. Paul: "And be not drunk with wine, wherein is luxury: but be ye filled with the Holy Spirit." ³ The Catechism files drunkenness under temperance and does not blink: "The virtue of temperance disposes us to avoid every kind of excess: the abuse of food, alcohol, tobacco, or medicine," and it attaches grave guilt to anyone who, by drunkenness, endangers others "on the road, at sea, or in the air." ⁴

But the sharpest answer, as usual, is Thomas Aquinas, who asked our exact question seven hundred years ago and answered it like a lawyer with a conscience. He distinguishes three cases. ⁵

One: you didn't know. The drink was stronger than you had any way of knowing. Then drunkenness "may be without sin." The tradition is not interested in ambushing you.

Two: you overdid it without intending to lose yourself. Real sin, but not the grave kind.

Three: you chose it. You drank in order to get drunk, or kept drinking knowing where it goes. Aquinas: "drunkenness is a mortal sin, because then a man willingly and knowingly deprives himself of the use of reason, whereby he performs virtuous deeds and avoids sin."

Read that definition again, because it's the whole answer. The sin is not "you enjoyed alcohol too much." The sin is the deliberate surrender of reason, the faculty you love God with, choose with, keep your promises with. Getting drunk on purpose is handing the keys of your soul to nobody and calling it a good time.

So: the line is not a number of drinks. The line is the knowing surrender of command. Cheerful is not the sin. "I came here to get wrecked" is the sin, and it was the sin before the first drink was poured, because morals, as Thomas says, take their species from what is directly intended.

That's the verdict. Where canon is clear, we say so: deliberate drunkenness is gravely wrong, and wine itself is good. Both halves are the ruling.

The oldest test in the book

Aquinas drew the line. Augustine, eight hundred years before him, explained why the line sits where it sits, and left a test you can run in the middle of a night out.

Too little does any man love thee, who loves some other things together with thee, loving it not on account of thee.

St. Augustine, Confessions X.29

His whole moral universe fits in that one sentence. Love God above all things, and love all things for the sake of God. Everything else in Catholic morals is commentary on that sentence. ⁶

Notice what it does to wine. The question is never "is this thing allowed": created things come pre-approved; God made them and called them good. Augustine in the City of God: a created good "is loved rightly when it is loved ordinately; evilly, when inordinately." Then he hands us the exact line this essay needed: "When the miser prefers his gold to justice, it is through no fault of the gold, but of the man; and so with every created thing." No fault in the wine. The question is the order of your loves while you're holding the glass.

And Augustine says love only ever runs in two directions. "Two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self." Every drink at that table is traveling toward one of those two cities.

So here's the test, and you can run it mid-party: which way is the drink moving you? If it's loosening you toward the people around you, more present, more generous, laughing at their jokes instead of rehearsing your own, out of your own head and glad at the table, then in that moment the wine is doing what wine is for. That is ordered love: a created good received with thanks and spent on the neighbor in front of you. If it's curving you inward, louder about yourself, performing, needing the room's attention, or sliding toward the other sins that travel with excess, the love has come off its order. Same glass. Opposite cities.

Two honest footnotes so nobody games this. First, the test runs inside Aquinas's line, not instead of it: fellowship cannot buy back reason. "One more for the boys" past the point of surrender is still surrender; you cannot lose command of your soul as a favor to your friends. Second, Augustine warns that we cheat on exactly this kind of test. He caught himself eating "for my health" when it was really for the pleasure, and admitted his soul used the ambiguity "as a cover and an excuse... under the cloak of health it may shelter the business of pleasure." Conviviality can be a cloak too. You know the difference. So does everyone else at the table.

Counsel, where prudence takes over

The verdict draws the sin line. Prudence asks better questions than "how close can I get to it." This part is counsel, not commandment; the reasoning is shown and the judgment is yours.

Why are you drinking? Festive drinking celebrates something real. Anesthetic drinking is trying to mute something real, and if the something is loneliness, which on the dating scene it often is, alcohol is a loan shark: it quiets the ache tonight and collects tomorrow.

What does your pattern say? The Catechism is honest that habit erodes freedom. A habit of Friday oblivion isn't neutral even on the Fridays you stop early.

Temperance is mastery, not abstinence. The Catechism defines it as the virtue that "moderates the attraction of pleasures" and "ensures the will's mastery over instincts." ⁷ The temperate person is not the one who can't enjoy; it's the one whose enjoyment stays under command. That's also, not incidentally, what trustworthy looks like from across the table. ⁸

For some people the prudent line is zero. Temperament, family history, or a fight with alcohol already lost once: for that person abstinence isn't scrupulosity, it's seamanship.

Driving is its own ruling, not a footnote. The Catechism's grave-guilt clause is about endangerment. There is no quantity of fun that buys back a life.