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Your comment made me curious so I did a bit of research - kosher wines are not boiled or adulterated for the purpose of making it unsuitable for Eucharist.

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.

I'd love to hear from someone that knows but afaik most things Kosher derive from ancient food safety where provenance was also part of safety.

Two reasons.

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.

This should be an indie puzzle video game

this is interesting, but it seems like a cover for old feuds over commercial food services to pious people. In the USA there was a specific, constructed and lawful means to end "pious people captured by commercial efforts masked as piety" and secondly, a constructed reform within religious communities, to move past this sort of obvious, power and profit motivated supply chain control. Not all places or people have been motivated to include themselves in these reforms, of course.

Actually, you're both right. One of the explanations (albeit, not the only one) given for why boiled wine remains kosher if handled by non-Jews is that it's considered unacceptable for non-Jews to use in idolatrous rituals.

Episcopalian here: we're more than ok with gluten-free wafers - not figuring out how to offer gluten-free wafers to someone whose health will be harmed by consuming even a small amount of gluten (anyone with celiac, for starters) is shoving them away from Jesus' (and not our) table. Given the last few years, a lot of people are, for good reasons, hesitant to sip out of a cup a bunch of other people just drank out of, no matter how carefully the person handling the chalice wipes it, and we're rational enough to understand that 19% alcohol Port really isn't killing anything, so wafers safe for everyone are necessary.

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.

That is very easily accomplished in any Roman Catholic church by simply offering them a sip of the Precious Blood. Your slur of "shoving them away from Jesus' table" is a strawman.

Gluten is indeed the protein in the wheat, so I guess not having at least some would impede transformation of the host into flesh. Makes total sense.

I think the Jewish community took the best method for knowing if a product is kosher: set up their own agencies that permit identifying marks on packaging if standards are met.

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.

There was a fascinating article that seems to have gone down the internet’s memory hole:

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.

Actually, some of the sisters (the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration) made a remarkable comeback around 2004, when the need for extremely-low-gluten altar bread arose. They devised and refined a formula, cleared it with all legitimate Church authorities, and began marketing it to a very niche but expanding market, and they have enjoyed very good success.

https://www.benedictinesisters.org/articledetail.php?id=434&...

You go to a mass. The church serves you grape juice and rice crackers. Just once.

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.

The idea isn't that you get in trouble for taking invalid communion, but rather, that particular communion doesn't count; you participated in one fewer eucharists than you thought you had.

(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.

> (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.

Catholic clergy demonstrably do not take validity very seriously. My experience (in Chicago) of validity --- a term I learned earlier today, despite growing up Catholic and attending 12 years of Catholic schooling --- is that Catholic priests will consecrate a Ritz cracker and a bottle of Nehi Grape. That can bother you, and that's fine, I respect whichever religion you belong to, but the one where twenty years of masses can be "invalidated" because of additives in the wine isn't my Catholicism, and it isn't the Catholicism of any parish I've been a part of in Chicagoland, and Chicago is one of the most Catholic cities in the United States, so I'm taking it as a good proxy for Catholicism everywhere.

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.

It would probably behoove you not to make sweeping statements, even based on personal experience in one particular archdiocese. If a priest is going around simulating a sacrament, using invalid matter for the Eucharist, and pulling the wool over parishioners' eyes about it, then they should absolutely be reported to the ordinary. If the ordinary doesn't care, which may be the case for you, then someone in the Roman Curia will definitely care. Of course, it may take the Dicastery for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments a long time to investigate, come to a decision, and issue a statement/sanctions, especially if the ordinary does not cooperate and resists any of this. But they will. I assure you that the validity of sacraments matters very much to people who matter.

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.

It would, and I think this is pretty clear, behoove you not to use words like "No faithful Catholic in his right mind will tell you", because (a) one just did, and (b) it makes you sound like a sedevacantist, which is I think not what you're going for.

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.

You're more generous that I: We could uncharitably describe some of the trad-caths' absolutist views (such as those on validity) as sheer fantasy, a house of cards lacking even a pretense of intellectual rigor and based on, how shall I put this, questionable reporting of events from 2,000 years ago [0] [1]. The fact that trad-caths hold so fiercely to such views lends support to what one might call a Hitchensian view of religion [2]; in that regard, the trad-caths are more like ultra-Orthodox Jews and radical Islamists than they are different.

[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 the priest who's at fault, because he's the one who's supposed to be informed and know better. Knowingly confecting an invalid sacrament is one of the worst sins you can commit as a Catholic. In Canon Law, it's known as "simulating a sacrament", i.e. going through the motions and faking it.

It's not unforgivable, but it's reprehensible.

I mean yea, I understand the idea.. making a sacrament out of sawdust to cut costs or whatever would be reprehensible, but using pressed twinkies as sacrament doesn't seem that awful to me, if that was all they had available in a hurry.

Probably why I'm not a priest. Hehe.