Saint Vincent Beer
The theologian and professor Francesco Satolli, then the Apostolic Delegate to the United States, wrote to Archabbot Leander Schnerr asking for the brewing to cease in 1895.
As part of a media campaign against the monastery, temperance advocate and Catholic priest George Zurcher published Monks and Their Decline in 1898 criticizing the archabbey for supporting the production and distribution of alcohol.
Through pressure from Cardinal Giacomo Filippo Fransoni and King Ludwig I of Bavaria, the monks gained permission from Pius IX in 1852 to brew beer "providing that every disorder is avoided".
[4] At the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, a resolution from reformist clergy banning monasteries from manufacturing beer was defeated, but a milder one chastising lay members who sold alcohol and encouraging them to enter another profession passed.
[10][11] Omer Klein, an archivist at Saint Vincent College, considers intra-Catholic ethnic conflicts between Irish-American Catholics and the German-American archabbey as the cause of the Beer Fuss.
[4] The Beer Fuss began in 1892 after Andrew Hintenach, the second archabbot and in place for only four and a half years, resigned in disagreement over the manufacturing of alcohol.
But for the fact of your selling it, and it being advertised in secular papers as "on tap" in various saloons, is regretted by the clergy of the diocese without exception, for it brings odium on the Church and shame on our people.
Since the local diocese did not control the monastery, Kittell petitioned Francesco Satolli, the Apostolic Delegate to the United States, to stop the archabbey from selling Saint Vincent Beer.
[8] Satolli did not forward Kittell's letter to Pope Leo XIII but wrote to Schnerr asking him to stop the large-scale production of alcohol due to the "evil of intemperance" and the work of the Catholic temperance movement.
[1][8] Kittell also applied pressure from within the church and engaged in a media campaign against the monks by writing anti-Saint Vincent Archabbey articles in the Catholic Citizen and the Western Watchman.
[14] Kittell suggested that the archabbey and its seminary and college take after the University of Notre Dame, a thriving Catholic institution of higher education that did not need to produce alcohol to balance its finances.
After being prompted by Martin Ignatius Joseph Griffin, a prominent historian of the Catholic Church, the New York Voice, a newspaper run by the Prohibition Party, released a "sensationalized exposé" about the archabbey, college, and brewery in April 1898.
[25] The drink was a thick, dark, and hoppy lager, which local curator Lauren Lamendola described as "made in the tradition of authentic Bavarian breweries".
