I am amused:

Scotch whisky fans didn’t need any spiritual confirmation that their drink of choice is divine indeed.

However, it doesn’t hurt that Pope Francis has actually declared Scotch whisky to be ‘the real holy water’. It’s important to note that he did say it as a light-hearted joke to the Scottish student priests who offered him a bottle as a gift at a reception in the Vatican.

Though the moment was captured on video last year, the story gained attention recently, as the piece of footage censored by the Vatican was for a soon-to-be-released BBC documentary about seminarians at the Pontifical Scots College in Rome. In a Daily Record article, documentary director Tony Kearney described the scene:

“He was really down to earth with them all [the student priests] and when they handed him the bottle, instead of just handing it to his assistant as he normally would with a gift, he held it up and said ‘Questa e la vera acqua santa’, which means ‘This is the real holy water.’”

As for the specific whisky he was commenting on, it was a bottle of Oban, from the west coast of Scotland (both the 14 and the 21 year old are superb whiskies, by the way).

Somehow, I don’t think that we’d ever here such humor from Southern Baptist.