Can You Drink Holy Water? Yes, but Not From the Church Font

Yes, you can drink holy water, and it is not a sin. Many Orthodox Christians drink it as a daily custom, and the Catholic Church has no rule for or against it. Do not drink from the font at the church door: tests found high levels of bacteria in church fonts, and in busy churches, kinds that can cause infection.

Holy water is ordinary water over which the Church has prayed. Chemically it is still water, and the blessing does not make dirty water clean. What it touches is a deeper thirst, the one Jesus spoke of beside a well in Samaria: “Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst” (John 4:13–14). Every drop of holy water points past itself to him.

Holy water is water blessed with the Church’s prayer, and it is meant to remind us of our baptism. The Catechism names “the sprinkling of holy water (which recalls Baptism)” among the signs that go with the Church’s blessings. At the door of a Catholic church, people dip their fingers in it and make the sign of the cross. The Book of Blessings speaks of using it “in blessing ourselves on entering the church or at home,” and the words a priest may use to introduce the blessing begin: “The blessing of this water reminds us of Christ, the living water.”

It is also sprinkled. Since at least the ninth century, priests have blessed water on Sundays and sprinkled the people with it, and families have carried it home. Hincmar of Reims told his priests then that people “may carry some away in clean vessels so as to sprinkle their houses, fields, vineyards, and cattle.” St Andrew’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral in London says it may be “sprinkled on people, objects, vehicles, buildings, and even animals in order to sanctify them and drive away evil.”

Chemically, nothing happens that water would not do. Even at Lourdes, where the Church has recognised many cures, the sanctuary says plainly that its spring water “has no therapeutic properties or specific properties,” and that “scientific analyses have not found it to contain any special properties.”

The churches pray for more than that. St Andrew’s tells its people that holy water “can be drunk for spiritual and physical well-being,” and one Catholic prayer of blessing asks “that those who are sprinkled with this water may be renewed in body and spirit.” The Catholic Church calls holy water a sacramental. “Sacramentals do not confer the grace of the Holy Spirit in the way that the sacraments do,” the Catechism says, “but by the Church’s prayer, they prepare us to receive grace and dispose us to cooperate with it.” Drinking it does not add to that. Fr Caleb La Rue, chancellor of the Catholic Diocese of Lincoln in Nebraska, puts it simply: “Holy water is not magic, and drinking it – while not forbidden – is not more efficacious than when we dip our fingers in it and make the sign of the cross.”

Water from a church font is not. In a study published in 2002, researchers in Seville tested the holy water fonts of the city’s churches and found “a strong bacterial contamination.” Of the bacteria they identified, “Thirty out of the 37 different species isolated from holy waters are known human pathogens.” They traced it to people’s hands: “The high bacterial contamination is related to human skin transmission.”

A study from the Medical University of Vienna, published in 2012, found much the same in Austria. “All holy water samples from churches and hospital chapels showed extremely high concentrations” of bacteria, and germs of faecal origin appeared “only in the most frequently visited churches.” The researchers warned that holy water “can be another source of infection, especially in hospital chapels and frequently visited churches.” Holy springs fared little better: “only 14% met the microbiological and chemical requirements of national drinking water regulations.”

Neither study tested holy water that people take home, and no church teaching covers this. Plain good sense does: do not drink from a font or stoup that many hands have touched, least of all in a busy church or a hospital chapel. If you want holy water to drink, bring clean drinking water in a clean bottle and ask a priest to bless it. How to get holy water for your home, and who can bless it, is answered in how to make holy water at home.

No. The Catholic Church has no rule against it. Fr La Rue writes, “As far as I can tell, the Church has no official stance on this. I could not find anywhere that the Church either encourages or discourages this practice.” He sees reasons on both sides. Drinking it can recall “our Lord’s words to the Woman at the Well regarding life giving water,” while baptism, the sacrament holy water recalls, is given by pouring or immersing, not by drinking.

The one thing to avoid is treating the water as a charm. The Catechism warns that “To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition.” Holy water drunk with faith and prayer is a small act of love toward God. Holy water drunk as a lucky potion is something else.

Yes. Drinking it is part of Orthodox life. At the feast of Theophany, when the Church remembers the baptism of Christ, the Great Blessing of Water asks the grace of the Holy Spirit “upon the water and upon those who will partake of it,” in the words of the Orthodox Church in America.

Many Orthodox families keep that water at home and drink a little each morning. “It is a pious custom,” one Orthodox guide explains, “for Orthodox Christians to begin the day, after their morning prayers and before eating, by consuming a particle of antidoron and drinking agiasmos, or blessed water.” Antidoron is the blessed bread given out after the Liturgy. A prayer for that moment, from the newsletter of the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St John the Baptist, asks God for health of soul and body together:

O Lord my God, may Thy holy gift and Thy Holy Water be unto forgiveness of my sins, unto enlightenment of my mind, unto strengthening of my spiritual and bodily powers, unto health of my soul and body, unto vanquishing of my passions and weaknesses, by Thy boundless merciful kindness, through the prayers of Thy Most-pure Mother and all Thy Saints. Amen.

Can it be drunk after eating? The Orthodox rule book for services, the Typikon, answers for the Theophany water, as quoted by the Russian Orthodox site Pravmir: “those who do not drink it because they have already consumed food, are mistaken, for God’s grace is granted for the sanctification of the entire world and all creatures.”

Not unless a priest blesses it. In 1858 Bernadette Soubirous heard the Lady of the grotto say, “Go and drink at the spring and wash yourself there,” and pilgrims have done so ever since. The Sanctuary of Lourdes is careful about what the water is: “it is not holy water: water from the Spring can only become holy through the action of a priest.” Bernadette herself said, “We take the water like medicine… We must have faith, we must pray: this water will have no virtue without faith!”

Pilgrims drink it from eighteen fountains beside the grotto, and it is free. Since 1858, the sanctuary says, “seventy-two cures have been recognised as miraculous; the most recent, that of Antonia Raco, dates from 2025.” Of the first seventy, it counts fifty healed “by contact with Lourdes water,” most of them at the baths.

The custom is very old. A fourth-century prayer over water and oil, from the bishop Serapion, asks God that “all fevers, every evil spirit, and all maladies be put to flight by him who either drinks these beverages or is anointed with them.” Gregory of Tours wrote of a sixth-century hermit, Eusitius, who could cure fever “by giving its victims to drink of water that he had blessed.” The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910, which gathers these accounts, adds that in some places people carried the water of baptism home in vessels and kept it there.

Once, and it is not a comfort. The only verse in the King James Bible that says “holy water” is in Numbers 5, the trial of a wife her husband suspects of adultery: “the priest shall take holy water in an earthen vessel; and of the dust that is in the floor of the tabernacle the priest shall take, and put it into the water” (Numbers 5:17). Then “he shall cause the woman to drink the bitter water” (Numbers 5:24). Nothing in the New Testament asks Christians to drink blessed water.

What the Gospels do give us is an invitation. On the last day of the feast in Jerusalem, Jesus “stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink” (John 7:37). The water in the bottle on our shelf is a sign of that water, never a substitute for it. And the Bible’s last page ends with the same call, held open to everyone: “And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely” (Revelation 22:17).

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• How to Make Holy Water at Home: Who Can Bless It and How to Use It
• Holy Water Prayers for Your Home: How to Bless Each Room
• What Is Epiphany, and Why Do Christians Celebrate It?
• Baptism vs Christening: What’s the Difference?
• Orthodox vs Catholic: How the Two Churches Differ and Why They Split