I’m ELCA, and we have a tray with pre-filled cups (white grape juice) and empty cups. You take whichever you prefer, and get a bit of wine poured from the common chalice if that’s what you want. You also get a bit of bread.
We use intinction when we use wafers - which is most regular Sundays.
You get a wafer and then dip it into the chalice of your choice. One has white grape juice and one has wine.
Real bread is used the first Sunday of the month, holidays and other certain Sundays.
My church gives you a chioce of either a common cup, or the wafer dipped in the wine from a different cup. In practice, I use the common cup on special occasions like church holidays, and the dipped wafer the other times.
Previous congregations had individual thimble sized shotglasses you took, and put in a basket on the way back to your seat.
I don’t have a cite, but there supposedly a study done years ago addressing communicable disease and common cup practice, and the conclusion was that it was no less healthy than the other styles of communion, provided real wine was used. The alcohol was the assumed reason for the results…
The church I went to as a kid did it with individual tiny cup-like things, that may have even been disposable. Everybody got their own “shot o’ Christ” from the tray passed down the aisle, that had holes in it to secure the cups. And it was grape juice, not wine.
Does any denomination other than Roman Catholic or Orthodox believe in transubstantiation?
If the wine is only symbolic then there’s no reason why it couldn’t be any liquid. If however, you believe that the wine transforms, then you really can’t substitute in anything for the wine.
Your doctor uses the blood of Christ to sterilize his tweezers? Wow, that’s some serious infection control there.
You’ve got that backwards. The Transubstantiation is miraculous, so it would be kind of silly to insist that God could transform wine, but not water. “Wonder bread and Grape Juice” was a popular expression when I was young, referring to priests who were under 30. Symbolic communion requires that the same substances be used.
Also, church wine is, IME, less alcoholic than real wine. Ours was about 5% alcohol. Good thing, too, as I drank about a third of a bottle before a Good Friday service when I was 13.
I’ve never heard of swabbing the chalice with alcohol. When we served communion wine, we just rotated the chalice and wiped it with linen. That was at least 25 years ago, though.
Jewish here. We don’t do communion, but we do do kiddush (blessing over wine), after which everyone is supposed to drink some wine. The rabbi or cantor has a special cup (usually a fancy silver cup) for kiddush, and most Jews who do kiddush at home have kiddush cups at home. At home, everyone would take a sip from the same kiddush cup. At the synagogue, they pass out trays of disposable plastic cups of wine.
[philosophical nitpick mode]The wine takes on the substance of the Blood of Christ, but it retains all of the accidents of wine, including the accident of the sterilizing qualities of C[sub]2[/sub]H[sub]5[/sub]OH.[/philosophical nitpick mode]
Current Roman Catholic practice is to wipe and rotate the cup, as mentioned above. Intinction is still acceptable, but it’s regarded as rather old-fashioned, and in my years of serving as a eucharistic minister, I’ve never seen it (I mostly know about it because they told us about the possibility in training). However, it’s also doctrine that either species of the Eucharist separately contains both the Body and the Blood, so it’s acceptable to receive one without the other and still receive the full Eucharist. So if a person were unhappy with the cleanliness of a common cup, or for some other reason found it inadvisable to partake of the cup (alcoholism, alcohol intolerance, personal preference, etc.), they could just receive the wafer. It works both ways, too: Someone with a wheat allergy, for instance, could skip the wafer and receive only the wine (I don’t know what someone with both a wheat allergy and alcohol intolerance would do).
On the sterilization issue, remember that natural wine (unfortified and undiluted) is exactly strong enough to kill microbes. Wine keeps on fermenting until it kills the yeast, then stops. I suppose it’s possible, though, that yeast and the infectious nasties have different tolerances for alcohol.
And saoirse, your logic seems sound, but the fact remains that the Roman Catholic Church (which believes in transubstantiation) requires alcoholic wine and unleavened bread, while many Protestant sects (which practice a symbolic communion) allow unfermented grape juice and leavened bread. Don’t ask me to explain why this is.
Well, RC Altar Wine is often fortified with Brandy to prevent spoilage (spoiled wine is a big no-no). It’s not necessary though, and there’s no strict guideline as to how much alcohol it must contain.
The wine must be:
So maybe your parish just skimped on the wine.
[url=http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01358a.htm]cite[/cite]
Some Anglicans/Episcopalians do; there is no ‘official’ doctrine on how the Eucharist works. I’ve never heard of an Episcopal Church using anything but wine, but strangely I have seen white (?) wine used. We mostly don’t talk about how it works; we just do it. But just about any doctrine that you can come up with, somewhere an Episcopalian believes it.
In my church, the priest would more dump the bread in your mouth than you taking it off the spoon - he was on the steps to the altar so he remained high enough to do so.
Well altar wine has a reputation for being weak. Every former altar boy I’ve talked to has reported the same thing. I can’t see why the wine would need preserving. Unopened wine takes a long time to turn, and an opened bottle only needed to keep for two weeks, tops.
Of course this was back when there were two morning masses Monday through Friday, one morning mass on Saturday, one evening mass on Saturday, and five masses on Sunday. I’m sure the 21st-century Church, where four parishes share one priest, has more problems with that.
As all the right people are here in this thread.
What would happen if somone upon receiving the chalace quickly drunk it dry?
It is obviously a faux pas, but what would actually happen in such a situation? As it isn’t sacreligious (as spitting or purposefully spilling would be) would the communicant be told off or something?
In the church I went to in UK the quater turn and wipe method was used, commonly the wine would only be allowed by the communant to touch the lips, so wash back was imposible.
The Latin rite requires unleavened bread, but the sacrament can still be validly but illicitly confected with leavened bread. It may not be validly confected with non-alcoholic wine, though.
Depends on the priest. Some do the dropping thing; others are very strict about closing your mouth around the spoon to consume all of the Blood that remains on it.
My current priest used to be a seminary professor training future priests, so I’ll have to ask him if that question ever came up. I don’t imagine that a communicant would ever be ‘told off’ at the altar rail. My guess is that the priest (or chalice bearer) would simply go back to the altar and get more wine for the next person. The communicant who bogarted all of the Blood of Christ might receive a pastoral call from the priest later in the week to discuss the event.
I’ve never seen anyone chug the wine, but over the course of many small sips, sometimes one cup does go empty. When that happens, the eucharistic minister just holds the purificator (cloth napkin) over the top of the chalice, to indicate that it’s empty, and the rest of the folks in line either go to a different station, or just don’t take the wine. It’s no big deal.
yBeayf, thanks for the clarification. I know I’ve seen RC churches that used leavened bread, I knew that they weren’t strictly speaking supposed to, and I knew that it wasn’t as big a deal as non-alcoholic grape juice would be, but I didn’t know the details.
No can do, at least not anymore. The current norms state that it is no longer permissible to consecrate wine in a separate container and then distribute it to to the chalices; it must be in the chalices before the consecration. Therefore, if someone drains a chalice, it can’t be refilled.
My thanks for the answers so far. Interesting, that this thread on [urlhttp://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=373835"]wine in biblical times is still churning along.
As I said in the OP and apparently it bears repeating, the question was in no way meant to be insulting. I simply had no idea that it was customary to have a purification cloth on hand soaked with rubbing alcohol, that was used to wipe down the cup after every few congragants had taken a sip. I stand corrected.
Besides, the Autoclave would wreck the bouquet of the wine, now wouldn’t it? 
It’s also fascinating the some folks say altar wine was “fortified” with brandy ( made stronger ) while others say altar wine was weakened for whatever reason.
I agree as a non-wine-drinker-in-a-religious-setting that grape juice is best, because it seems unreasonable to force recovering alcoholics to chose between doing what the Priest/Minister says and falling off the wagon.
[QUOTE=Cartooniverse]
I simply had no idea that it was customary to have a purification cloth on hand soaked with rubbing alcohol, that was used to wipe down the cup after every few congragants had taken a sip. I stand corrected.
Who said this? This just simply doesn’t happen, at least not in the RC church. The only alcohol present is that which is in the wine itself. Rubbing alcohol, or any other form of non-grape derived alcohol would defile the sacrament.
The risk of infection is miniscule without having to go to extraordinary lengths.
No one is forced to recieve the wine, you can have full communion inthe RC church at least without taking the wine, it’s a personal decision.
Yes, they can do.
They’re still doing it that way at catholic churches in the Minneapolis, Mn area.
And when I was home at Mothers Day, in another diocese, they did it that way, too. They had a large pitcher on the altar that was blessed by the priest, and then poured into chalices for the dozen or so servers to distribute.
So if that’s no longer allowed, somebody forgot to give several dioceses the cite.