KC archbishop clarifies wine validity norms
pillarcatholic.com
pillarcatholic.com
What materialists and some scientists forget is that matter matters. What materialists, some scientists, gnostics, and some Protestants forget is that matter has spiritual matters. God became man so that man could become God - Athanasius [1]
Jews (and thus Jesus) followed particular instructions by to obtain material effects (think Passover or Jericho). Similar to preparing a meal, particular ingredients and particular processes yield a particular result. Change some of the ingredients and you get a different result.
What Jesus did in the Last Supper was to elevate material behaviors to produce spiritual effects. He takes the Passover meal and uses it to share his divinity.
If wine and bread is needed to share his divinity, then the questions of what is wine and what is bread are of the utmost importance for a Catholic.
[1] - https://www.catholic.com/qa/what-so-that-we-might-become-god...
[0] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+10%3A25-37...
To say Jesus believes all formalities are bad is not true.
For this partially question, what is wine, I don’t think it is preventing us from loving God and neighbor. I do think it is important because of the centrality of wine in the Gospels. T he miracle of the wedding feast at Cana, image of the vine and branches, and with the culmination of the last supper.
He also gave us the Eucharist. The body of Christ doesn’t distract us from our work - it allows us to do our work better. So to debate about the Eucharist is how athletes debate about training regimens or diets. If we can improve how we prepare ourselves for the work that need to be done, we can do the will of God better.
Shame on the Catholic Church for trying to pin down a word so that it means one thing and one thing only.
Traditionalist Catholicism (tradcath-ism) is not the same religion as Roman Catholicism. It's a weird splinter thing.
The matter at hand is not a trad thing (but I will disclose that I am in the trad camp): these are just basics covered in e.g. the 1997 Catechism promulgated by John Paul II and the the 1983 Code of Canon Law, which are 100% mainstream.
Nevertheless, there is no objection to using eastern rite leavening or wine made from grapes from elsewhere. The eastern rites are just doing what they've always done and the wine just has to be grape wine and fermented. This is not a novel rule. It's how it's always been done. You can read any older document on the matter to realize the so called traditionalists are not creating a new religion.
I don't know why the Catholics have such a problem with this. Pretty much every story you read about Jesus, he was pointing out how wine could be anything. Even water.
So yeh, being picky about the definition of wine is probably the most blasphemous thing anyone could say or do.
A thing is what it is.
So, like this archbishop has mandated, you can choose only wine that is especially certified for sacramental use, which means that the makers pledge they're following Canon Law in making the wine. But, again, this is a self-certification, and it means you're trusting the makers when they say what the ingredients are. They're still not regulated, they're still not mandated to have a label.
I also learned, from commenters, that some wines are specifically made to be invalid matter, such as Kosher wines, which are boiled, and cane sugar is added, and so they deliberately invalidate the wine so that Catholics cannot use it for the Eucharist, which I suppose would be sacrilegious in the opinion of many Jews.
This also relates to the makers of altar bread, which of course can't really be purchased in a grocery store and so it's always made especially for sacramental use. There has been a marked rise in the use of "low-gluten hosts" for those with Celiac disease or gluten allergies. The Catholic Church has weighed in on this, and has specifically said that there must be gluten in the host in order to be valid matter. So there are altar bread manufacturers who make host out of potato, or rice flour, and while Episcopalians and Lutherans may be OK with this, Catholics are not, and so pastors must be careful that their "low-gluten hosts" are not "gluten-free". Just to confuse the matter, an extremely low-gluten product can be marketed as "gluten-free" according to FDA rules, so enjoy the confusion. I have seen Catholic parish bulletins advertising "gluten-free hosts" and I just cringe, because they're basically saying "we use invalid matter for our Eucharist!" even if they really are using that approved, low-gluten altar bread. And there are nuns who proudly make the stuff just for that reason.
Rather, according to ancient Jewish tradition, if kosher wine is boiled (which is called Mevushal wine), it remains kosher even if handled by non-Jews. This is in contrast to uncooked kosher wine, which loses its kosher status if handled by non-Jews.
There were some alleged cultist/idolatry practices involving wine that would cause it to become non kosher so it’s easier to just blanket ban anything handled by a goy. I think boiling makes it unusable for those same rituals.
It’s also to discourage fraternising (especially romantically) with goyim.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosher_certification_agency
The Catholic Church would do well with this, considering member churches often follow centralized decisions. A certifying agency in each diocese should work well.
Eucharistic bread was made by religious communities. Then a for-profit corporation began competing with the nuns, and using brutal tactics was able to get a monopoly on supplying Eucharistic bread.
In any case, there’s no need for certification because there are so few sellers. It’s a specialized product. It’s not like priests are picking it up at the store.
https://www.benedictinesisters.org/articledetail.php?id=434&...
My parish deals with it the easy way: we just do gluten-free wafers for everyone, and our priest reminds us not to intinct (dip) the wafers if we'd rather not drink the wine, as intinction is far worse than sipping for sharing germs... hands are filthy.
Do you think after you die, at the pearly gates, you're going to get sent to hell for "consuming invalid Eucharist?"
That... just... takes things to a whole new level. This idea of "Commercial goods with a catholic church seal of approval!" seems to go directly against at least a few of Jesus' teachings.
(I think, but am not totally sure, that this is a fringe tradcath belief, and that for the overwhelming majority of Catholics (including the clergy), this doesn't matter at all; if you felt it counted, did it in good faith, &c, it counted.
This is in no way a "fringe" belief. As you can see by this archbishop's statement (he is no "fringe tradcath") Catholic clergy take validity very, very seriously.
Now there some other cases recently concerning Baptism. There was a priest who, it turned out, was never baptized at all, and therefore had never been a priest. The Church officials had to release a statement and notify everyone who was affected (because he wouldn't have been able to celebrate the Eucharist, etc.) and of course the priest was baptized and then properly ordained.
Then in yet another case, there was a priest in Arizona (and apparently also a deacon in Michigan) who had performed baptisms for nigh on 20 years using an invalid formula. The formula was invalidated by his use of "we" instead of "I". That's right, it was the wrong pronoun and it made all the difference in the world. The bishop of Phoenix released a statement to inform everyone affected that their baptism was, in fact, invalid, and they'd need to have this ceremony repeated. However, the bishop of San Diego said it wasn't really a big deal and not to worry too much about it. So yes, there is some variance about this, and there are clerics who say it doesn't matter, but I'd say that the latter bishop is an outlier, because that attitude doesn't really comport with Catholic law and doctrine. In fact I think it's harmful to tell invalidly-baptized people that it doesn't matter, because in another diocese 20 years from now, it may really really matter.
The formulas and the definition of valid matter have been distilled down to very simple elegant definitions over the years. It is definitely not difficult, for example, to bake altar bread that meets the simple definition of validity, because it's very exclusive and simple. Likewise, the words in the formula can be very simple. The priest must say "I absolve you" in the Confessional (in some language) or it doesn't work! In fact, that's all he has to say! The priest must say "This is My Body... This is... My Blood" or it's not the Eucharist!
These rules seem oh so simple and uncomplicated, but it always seems like some ad libber can get in there and bollocks it up.
You can be a part of some other Catholicism that rejects Nehi Grape! That is, and I am not fucking with you about this, just fine.
I mean, can you imagine the turmoil and unrest in a Church that would happen if the faithful couldn't depend on the validity of our sacraments? Imagine if, at every Mass you attend, you have to second-guess the priest and peek at what kind of bread is being used, and whether that bread tastes like oil or sugar, and whether the priest is using proper wine, and many thousands of Catholics thrown into confusion about whether we had received the Body & Blood of Jesus or whether it had just been deliberately and cruelly simulated in front of us? Imagine the uproar that would occur! That is definitely something that Church officials don't want to deal with, because it shakes the foundations of the faith. No, validity is a very real concern for anyone who wishes to keep the peace among the faithful.
Regarding leavened bread: leavening altar bread in the Roman Rite is illicit but it will not be invalid matter. It is because our Eastern Catholic brethren very much use leavened bread, which if it's valid for one, it's valid for all. Likewise, a Byzantine Catholic priest using unleavened bread would be acting illicitly, and probably get in a lot of trouble just from his parishioners, but it would still be a valid Eucharist.
Now, personally I definitely have seen priests and even provinces of religious orders where validity and liceity perhaps did not matter much at all. I was part of a community that used glass "chalices" (illicit), they eschewed crazy things like chasubles, and they used "gender-neutral" pronouns for God. Now they usually did use real altar bread and real wine for the Eucharist, but I'm fairly sure I saw a home-baked loaf thing used once. The way they played around with the words of the liturgy was disturbing to me, and honestly I determined that several of those priests really did not believe in the True Presence with the reprehensible way they treated the Eucharistic elements, post-consecration.
And this may be the case with your Chicagoan priests: they don't believe in the Real Presence, so why does it matter if they attempt to consecrate unfermented grape juice? (By the way, just looking at Ritz Cracker ingredients online, I'd say they're also invalid, due to lots of sugars, salt, oils, soy lechitin, and other gross stuff -- not even fit for human consumption, I'd say.) I'd say it is very common for rank-and-file priests to not care much about their vocation or for the rights of the faithful. But the faithful have a right to a properly-celebrated, licit liturgy with valid matter, and Rome tends to uphold those rights, but bishops have a lot of ordinary power in their own dioceses, and so if the bishop is obstructive or drags his heels, then Rome may have a real difficult time championing the rights of the faithful.
The Church is not "some other Catholicism" that "rejects Nehi grape", I assure you that it is the other way around. No faithful Catholic in his right mind will tell you that unfermented grape soda can be valid matter for the Eucharist; it was simply the fact that you had a series of heretical priests, and they may have been given ample cover by their bishop. There is not "tradcath" radical hardlining here: it's just simple doctrine.
To me, and, I think, to a lot of mainstream ("actual") Catholics, the position you're taking is the spiritual equivalent of the people who pay way too much for fancy speaker cables because they insist they triangle tested it and the expensive cables sound better. And, hey, if that's your thing, go with God.
[0] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2004/10/troubling_incon...
[1] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2004/10/why_i_cant_acce...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens#Criticism...
It's not unforgivable, but it's reprehensible.
Probably why I'm not a priest. Hehe.
> Can. 924
> §1. The most holy eucharistic sacrifice must be offered with bread and with wine in which a little water must be mixed.
> §2. The bread must be only wheat and recently made so that there is no danger of spoiling.
> §3. The wine must be natural from the fruit of the vine and not spoiled.
https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-canonici/eng/docume....
To a casual reader, it may seem the "valid" and "licit" are nearly interchangeably in this article, but they are two different things and there are cases where an action is valid and illicit, or invalid, but licit.
Canon 126 is also relevant for this particular case:
> Can. 126 An act placed out of ignorance or out of error concerning something which constitutes its substance or which amounts to a condition sine qua non[1] is invalid. Otherwise it is valid unless the law makes other provision. An act entered into out of ignorance or error, however, can give rise to a rescissory action according to the norm of law.
This is part of why Catholicism does not view itself as legalistic despite having a well-developed code of law. In minor things, it is assumed that God gives the benefit of the doubt so mistakes made out of ignorance/error do not affect the validity of the action. This also helps with scrupulosity and splintering over minor things.
---
[1] Latin for "an essential condition" or "something absolutely indispensable"
Indeed it seems likely based on archaeological evidence that common wines drunk in the region and at the time contained additives for flavor! See https://www.vivino.com/wine-news/searching-for-the-wine-from...
Furthermore, how far should one take this silly adherence to imagined fact? If we discover that in Jerusalem they drank predominantly wine from some now extinct local varietal, does that make all masses since invalid?
I, like the poster you’re replying to, grew up Catholic, and this sort of slavish adherence to stuff some church person made up at some point in the past has always struck me as one of the more ridiculous parts of the religion.
But on the other hand it's important for your religion to stand out. Unless it's going to result in mass persecution or genocide, you want your believers to stand out, the requirements of your religion to impact on everybody else. So you get silly rules - not really that tricky to obey but seemingly pointless because hey, if nobody is grousing about your silly rules, nobody is noticing your religion exists.
This sort of thing is only a big problem once it tilts the whole society. People will probably vary in their tolerance but somewhere between "The weird logo on my groceries apparently signifies that a specific religious group may consume this product" and "Your existence is prohibited by the established religion in this country and so you'll be executed" there's a line crossed.
But the last supper wasn't a Catholic mass. Why is this one arbitrary detail so important when the entire ritual bears only a superficial resemblance to a dinner held by Jews in 33AD Jerusalem?
It seems odd that the man who said (paraphrasing because I don't want to look it up) "The Sabbath was made to serve men, not men the Sabbath" would insist on such pedantry.
During Jesus lifetime, there is archeological evidence that apices and fruits - including pomegranates, mandrakes, saffron and cinnamon - were used to flavour wines, and tree resin were added to help preserve them.
So, the wine drank at the Last Supper might actually resemble the mulled wine some of us drink at Christmas.
Basically, this has nothing to do with being faithful to Jesus, but more with archaic rules that were agreed upon centuries after Jesus' lifetime.They are canonical to Catholic teachings though.
I'm sure there's some traditionalist Catholic rebuttal to this! And I'm fine with that. I'd just say: traditionalist Catholicism is not the same religion that ordinary mainstream Catholics practice.
He used a specific bottle. But catholics were pragmatic enough to say "well, surely he didn't mean that bottle specifically." And they don't latch on to the vintage, either- doesn't have to be the same grapes grown in the same region. They don't latch on to the age of the wine, or its alcohol content. But those variations don't matter! Because.... I guess because, uh.... oh heavens me-oh-my-oh, this is a pickle. Turns out it's all subjective.
Another former Catholic here. We should all care because a controversy such as this:
- diverts attention from Jesus' "Prime Directive" — which was straight from the Hebrew Bible, of course (Leviticus 19:18) — that we seek the best for others, even our enemies, as we do for ourselves; and
- falsely implies that not following pharisaic rules makes one less worthy and thus excluded from the Prime Directive.
This harms civil society in general, not just Catholics.
From the first century A.D. to the present, the Church has cared about holding true to the Apostolic tradition, which includes teachings re: how to treat others as well how to worship God.
Oh. So then I guess either Matthew or Acts got it wrong about whose name should be invoked in baptizing: If Jesus really said to baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then the apostles apparently ignored his instructions — compare Matt. 28.19 with Acts 2.38, 8.16, 10.48, 19.5. [0]
On a tangentially-related subject: Peter, preaching at Pentecost, seems to have flagrantly misrepresented his scriptural source. [1]
While we're at it: The Apostles all indisputably thought that Jesus would be returning Real Soon Now — and that just didn't happen. [2]
[0] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2004/10/troubling_incon...
[1] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2004/10/troubling_incon...
[2] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2005/10/is_jesus_coming...
This still very much allows for disagreement on matters not formally settled, and is no barrier to a person untrained in ecclesiastical history and dogmatic theology from being edified by reading and/or hearing the Bible.
You may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth.The church is the pillar and bulwark, and we are on the surest footing when interpreting Sacred Scripture standing atop the pillar; everything else is a complete non-starter, though can be fodder for debates and whatnot.
On that much, we agree.
> the context for understanding Matthew, Acts, et al. is the teachings of the Councils, Fathers, and Doctors of the Church ....
You might consider another possibility: That the apostolic succession belongs to all the baptized, not just to what I once referred to as "the Twelve's decisions to anoint themselves as a self-perpetuating elite" in the early church. [0]
[0] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2007/02/the_apostolic_s...
1. Unfalsifiable, ipse dixit proclamations by church "overseers," i.e., bishops (Greek: ἐπίσκοπος, episkopos, whence English's episcopal) aren't persuasive.
Long ago I read translations of the surviving writings of some of the earliest church fathers — such as in the page you linked. I was struck by the distinct impression that the first bishops essentially bootstrapped themselves into authority — they peremptorily announced:
- that they were successors of the Apostles; and
- that their apostolic succession entitled them to be in charge.
(EDIT: This foreshadowed, by some 1,700 years, the U.S. Supreme Court's bootstrapped declaration that judges have the power to decide the constitutionality of congressional legislation, in Marbury vs. Madison, where Chief Justice John Marshall famously said that in case of conflicting statutory- and constitutional provisions, "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. ...")
And these first bishops persuaded their (self-selected?) flocks to acknowledge their authority; eventually, what started out as an arguable heresy on the part of these "overseers" became carved in stone as a core principle of church governance. [0]
2. The church fathers relied extensively on the letters of Paul, né Saul, of Tarsus. Recall that Saul/Paul started out as a fiery persecutor of Christians — then suddenly "flipped" and became equally zealous preaching his version of Christianity.
And remember that Paul preached what he claimed to be his own gospel, not received from any man, but directly from Jesus himself, whom he had never met in life — if Paul had known Jesus before the latter's execution, he surely would have trumpeted the fact, in his Epistle to the Galatians and elsewhere.
[0] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2006/04/what_is_the_pro...
For example, God can come back tomorrow riding in from heaven on a Ford mustang but the church isn't going to declare this as true and make everyone wait for it tomorrow.
If God tells you to do X so Y happens, then you should do X. You should not do Z and then expect Y to happen with certainty. It might. It might not. You cannot know.
I was similarly unaware of organizations like Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, and Society of the Divine Word. Heck, I was unaware of the word and concept "dicastery". This has been very illuminating.
In the Eucharist the words are "this is my blood".
> Any good house wine is fine... Bottom line: the finer quality of wine, the better it is. This is an important consideration since the wine selected will become the Body and Blood of Christ.
What about all the weddings?
How can a lay person know if the Mass they are attending “counts” ?
However as you can imagine this became an administrative nightmare as couples sought to divorce after such a secret marriage and no one could say whether the marriage was valid.
So the church required marriage vows to be made public and in front of witnesses in order to be legal.
However, the couple is the minister not the priest. During a Catholic marriage, the couple is seated on the sanctuary along with the priest . One of the few times laypeople can do that.
I don't mean this as a dismissal. If you're not Catholic you might not have noticed that there is a weird cultural moment happening right now, with a very small but noisy (or prominent, if you like) faction of traditionalists, many of them young hipsters. It's oddly centered on New York City and Kansas/Nebraska.
So I see things like this, almost unrecognizable from the church I grew up in, and I wonder if this is just another tendril of that movement.
I understand the need for a baseline to keep churches from holding mass with Fanta, and I agree that good wine is better than bad wine. But I easily imagine a Last Crusade moment where we learn that Jesus actually drank poor people's wine and, in an ironic twist (as suggested by a dead comment), it turns out that his wine was diluted and wouldn't fit the definition here.
But: this seems like something new. I doubt many people in my parish would care at all about the specific wine used at mass. For that matter: most people don't even take wine at mass.
In general, what I see gives me a lot of hope: people care (and that they care about the right stuff; worrying about sulfites is likely misguided). Overall, it can't be that a confession line is always empty but line to receive the Eucharist is 100% of parishioners.
(Shoutout to Boston HNers - check out OMV churches like St. Clements or St. Francis; historically, St. Clements was the first church in the Boston area to offer public Masses and sacrament of penance during the early days of COVID, including special-made arrangements like https://www.facebook.com/StClementShrine/posts/pfbid0zmWzyKa... They also have ample Eucharistic Adoration. IYKYK.)
There pre-Vatican rules regarding Eucharistic matter have been almost perfectly followed for a few decades.
So as a (former) Catholic: why can't the Church do something similar? Is it only because the market for sacramental wine is so much smaller than the market for halal foods?
What do these companies do ? They have the prayers on speaker and a robot/machine that slaughters the animals. Is it halal ? No. But there are some agencies who would gladly give you a "halal" certification for some money, and now you are certified halal.
"Halal" word in Arabic just means permissible. In the food context, we look for halal (permissible stuff, not logo) in not just meat, but also any product that contains animal by products/byproducts, like cheese for example. Microbial rennet is okay, animal rennet not so much. We usually avoid eating factory made food that contain animal products/byproducts. If it is something that can has vegetable and animal sources, then we check the ingredients/labels to see if something is specified. Sometimes they clearly specify vegetable source. Otherwise if source is not clear, or if not sure about the certification agency, we either look for a kosher label on that (if it contains some animal products/byproducts) or manually call the company and ask away any questions. If both of those are not possible, we look for something else.
Furthermore, I'm pretty sure he'd be angry enough to start tipping over tables in the square that anyone would claim that using a slightly different grape juice product invalidated anything about the events where it was consumed.
Of course, I'm sure this philosophical difference is exactly why there are so many splinter factions of Christianity, but it's hard for me to imagine making a religion a central part of one's life and then completely ignoring so much of the message that the core figure of that religion tried to get across.
[1] or even any dark red beverage, really.
In fact there's a historically grounded secular interpretation of the good samaritan parable indicating it's at least partially about exactly this. According to contemporaneous jewish moral norms, the priest in the parable has valid reason to avoid what he thinks is a dead body but only if he has a ritual duty to perform in temple in the near future. In the parable he is traveling "down from jersusalem" eg his duty is complete for now. Jesus is coming down against him maintaining ritual purity without a specific liturgical duty to.
I'm super sure that God really really cares about the kind of wine, and not the intentions of the humans asking for help
We hear it, as well, with things like, "Does God really care if I eat meat on Friday?"
But actually, the whole point is that if we can't expend the effort to make trivial sacrifices, or to follow seemingly trivial rules about valid matter for the Eucharist, then why on earth would we expect ourselves to get more important things right?
Catholicism is not as persnickety as you might think, but there is a "When you know better, do better" mentality. Now that the bishop has realized the problem, he's taking steps to do better and rectify the issue. Yes, we trust that God knows what's in our hearts, but that doesn't mean we should just shrug our shoulders and say, "Not a big deal" when we have the opportunity to do better.
Reminds me of the Van Halen brown M&Ms
https://www.insider.com/van-halen-brown-m-ms-contract-2016-9...
What he said was that the Masses were invalid, a term that means the conditions necessary for the sacrament were not present. He also said, "the intentions for which those Masses were offered were not satisfied," meaning that the Church did not offer a valid Mass for those intentions, not that God ignored people's prayers.
This quote from America magazine, a Jesuit publication, touches on the nuances of such cases:
> “Invalid” is not the same as “unreal.” Our mistakes do not prevent God from entering into a moment any more than our sins do. In the wake of Father Hood’s case, Archbishop Allen H. Vigneron of Detroit wrote,“The Church, following the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, recognizes that God has bound Himself to the sacraments, but He is not bound by the sacraments.”
What that means is that although we must never be cavalier and make mistakes with the assumption that God will overlook them, we can nevertheless have hope that God offers his graces to those who sincerely seek them, even extra-sacramentally, and especially when we take the time to remedy the issue once we become aware of it.
I'm somehow reminded of corporate McDonald's grift of contractually forcing Taylor ice cream machines on franchisees.
EDIT: cbfrench below correctly points out that that price is per case...the devil was hiding in the details and I stand corrected.
[1] https://www.zieglers.com/church-goods/sacramental/sacramenta...
Here’s a longer, more punctilious discussion of the variety of wines that may qualify for sacramental use in the Roman Catholic Church: https://wdtprs.com/2013/04/quaeritur-is-sherry-valid-matter-...
Thanks for the clarification; the devil certainly was in the details on that one.