“This Pastoral Letter is an attempt to initiate a debate that will help us to gradually change our unhealthy attitudes towards alcohol”, said Bishop Eamonn Walsh, vice-chair of the Irish Bishops’ Drugs and Alcohol Initiative. The Bishop, speaking in Dublin on Sunday 18 February, Day of Prayer for Temperance, was presenting the pastoral letter of the bishops for the Sunday of Temperance and for Lent 2007, with the title “Alcohol: the Challenge of Moderation”. The “Sunday of Temperance” was celebrated a few days before Ash Wednesday, the day on which, says the Letter, “many people decide to observe temperance during Lent in the spirit of giving up in order to become better people”. The bishops’ Drugs and Alcohol Initiative (ibdi@eircom.net) is aimed at making suggestions about how moderation can be promoted at local parish level. To this end, the bishops are preparing a DVD of pastoral aid for use in schools and colleges. After 150 years, said Bishop Walsh recalling the death in 1856 of the Capuchin friar Theobald Mathew who devoted his whole life to fighting the scourge of alcohol, “we still have a destructive relationship with alcohol”. Particularly at risk are young people under the age of twenty, top of the world league table of binge-drinkers.
