Yeah, well, me neither. But for some reason, it does seem to be accepted by some.
As I understand it, non-alcoholic wine is invalid, but leavened bread is only illicit. So a priest shouldn’t use leavened bread, but if he goes ahead and does so anyway (as many do), the Church maintains that the bread is still transubstantiated and still bears the real presence of Christ. Using non-alcoholic wine, however, is considered invalid, so the grape juice would not be transubstantiated, and would not contain the real presence. I would presume that it is also illicit to go through the motions for something which is invalid, so a Catholic priest should not use purely symbolic grape juice along with the transubstantiated bread. If a priest has some reason to want to avoid using alcohol, the proper course of action would be to use the bread, alone.
Also, while there are rules about exactly what bread is licit, the specific form of dry cracker which tastes like styrofoam is not the only choice. Those wafers are only customary, probably because they’re convenient for handing out portions to large numbers of people. But wheat tortillas or matzo would also be perfectly licit, and in fact, matzo might arguably be “better”, since that’s (presumably) what Jesus would have used.
As a bus kid in a baptist church as a kid, “wine” in the bible referred to grape juice. Of course the point of Dungeons and Dragons was to drive you to suicide, and all of those pictures of Jesus with long hair were just ridiculous – of course he had a crew cut like a fine, young man.
Oddly, it hasn’t put me off of religion, despite being science-centric. If I could get over the whole “the Pope represents God on Earth” thing, I’d probably be Catholic based on their official acceptance of science as being real (as well as having a Catholic wife, I guess).
In practice, most Methodists that I know aren’t opposed to the single glass of wine with dinner or to cooking with alcohol, but most don’t make a habit of it–and there is certainly some awareness of the need to be aware of appearances. And I’ve heard the occassional anti-alcohol comment from the pulpit. But yes, alcohol is generally discouraged for social rather than scriptural reasons.
In contrast, a friend of mine was active in a local Church of the Nazarene. She declined to formally join the church–and a big issue was the attitude towards alcohol. As a part of joining the Nazarene church she would be asked to renounce alcohol. As I understood it, there were two major approaches to this requirement. One group of people said the magic words about renouncing alcohol and then went back to consuming alcohol/allowing it to be consumed in their presence, etc. My friend found this problematic on the grounds of hypocracy. The other approach was to actually renounce alcohol and never consume it again. This was problematic because she grew up in a house where her dad liked to drink a beer when he finished various chores about the house. Given that the house that my friend and her husband had purchased needed lots of sweat equity, my friend wanted to be able to store a 6 pack of beer in her fridge, without violating any promises to avoid alcohol. Since that time my friend and her husband have switched churches–the alcohol thing was a major factor, but not the only factor involved.
I certainly hope so. I was raised Catholic, and nobody at my church ever took wine except for the priest and those who would help him give out the communion wafers. I did get a sip of wine when I had my First Communion, but that was the only time. Is that strange?
I’m not sure it is strange, because in my parish growing up, they never had the wine, either. I’m pretty sure it was always consecrated, but they didn’t offer it to the congregation. These days, it seems to always be offered everywhere you go…perhaps it is a custom that has changed, for whatever reason.
Actually, while typing this, I think I may suspect the reason. Since I was a kid (in the 70s), there has been a very strong movement in the church to increase the role of the laity, and minimize the “divide” between the laity and the clergy. The idea that the priests would consecrate the wine, and then be the only ones to partake in it, would not sit well with this more populist philosophy. I imagine this was a revision made as the laity has gotten more involved with the mass, with liturgy committees and the like.
Was it a Vatican II thing, along with mass in the vernacular?
Regards,
Shodan
You know, I don’t think that it was some kind of mandate of Vatican II, or anything like that (I am a post-Vatican II baby, myself…never been to a Latin Mass in my life). I think it’s just a general change in the culture of the Church since Vatican II, to be more populist and less clergy-centered. There is a lot of resentment, I think, among some folks (mostly of a certain generation, I think, which shall not be named by me! 
), at the idea of the church hierarchy, and in a lot of parishes, anything that can be done to give the laity priviliges that used to be reserved for the priests is being worked into the Mass & parish life.
On another message board (Christian themed) there are three or four threads discussing this question that have run over two thousand posts. As with most debates of this type, no one seems to be changing anyone’s mind.
The folks from the Seventh Day Adventist Church seem hard set against alcohol of any kind apparantly based upon the writings of a Mrs. Ellen G. White. They spend lots of time attempting to convince us that the “wine” in the scriptures was really “fresh, wholesome grape juice.”
That’s kind of cute to me…like these folks wouldn’t QUITE think of Jesus the same way if they knew he actually drank alcohol!
Like friend Longhair, I have been involved with the aforementioned board and those threads. To isolate the useful material available in those threads from enormous amounts of partisan blather:
[ol][li]The Greek word oinos (from which “vine” and “wine” are eventually derived) does not have a good English translation. It means, “the liquid stuff you get by pressing grapes, whether immediately when you can give it to kids, or after it’s fermented and good for getting tiddly.” Hence any reference to oinos might be either “grape juice” or “wine” depending on context. But probably the latter, as the former either turned to wine or went bad quickly.[/li][li]Wine, generally diluted with water, was the beverage in common use throughout the Bible area. Not the alcoholic beverage – the beverage. It was the one thing that could be stored without refrigeration. Children would begin drinking dilute wine with meals as soon as weaned.[/li][*]The Biblical strictures are not against wine but against drunkenness. Except for a sense, “if you can’t tell when to stop, don’t start” and “even if you can drink without problems, don’t do so in front of a stone alcoholic trying to quit.”[/ol]
The reason given for avoiding alcohol at my house was your body is “the temple of the Holy Ghost,” and since alcohol is bad, all the time, always, you wouldn’t do anything to defile the holy temple, would you?
Obviously, they thought prohibition was a good thing.
This attitude was so extreme that my mother refused to set out empty wine glasses for dinner at large gatherings and left the table when rum cake was served for dessert. I’m sure she thought rum cake would cause a drunken revelry and the Devil was soon to make an appearance.
Once when we planned to celebrate something or other with champagne, we purposely got a bottle of non-alcoholic sparkling cider for her, but she refused to drink it, saying that she couldn’t trust the label and we were trying to violate her principles!
A minister explained to me once that he did not drink alchohol for two reasons:
[ol]
[li]To avoid all appearance of evil.[/li][li]To avoid supporting the U.S. alcohol industry, which he viewed as detrimental. When he traveled in Europe, he did drink alcohol, because it was much more part of the culture there, and it would even have been impolite to not accept wine when offered by your host. In the U.S., there is more of a culture of binge drinking and getting paralytic, which he does not support.[/li][/ol]
The above does not represent my views on the subject, but I thought I’d throw it into the mix, since it does represent a view on the subject I’ve heard frequently.
Interesting POV, and very reasonable on his part, IMO.
In the Catholic Church, as mentioned, either the bread or wine is sufficient for receipt of the sacrament. So an alcoholic who wouldn’t want to have even one drop would be able to receive the Eucharist through the bread.
As far as regs on frequency of receipt, Catholics are required to attend Mass on Sundays and Holy Days. However, receiving the sacrament could be done as infrequently as once a year at Easter.
Of course Catholics in good standing are encouraged to receive as often as possible, but not more than once in a day, if the Masses are celebrating the same thing. For example, you could receive in the morning of Saturday to celebrate Saturday daily Mass, and the evening of Saturday as the vigil of Sunday’s Mass. You could receive Saturday night for Sunday and Sunday day for Sunday. You could receive on Sunday for Sunday Mass and then Sunday night as the vigil of a Monday Holy Day. But you couldn’t receive twice on Sunday for the same Sunday Mass celebration at different times. >whew<
Not at the time. I grew up in the 70s and 80s and our church didn’t distribute wine. I too remember the weirdness of having that tiny sip of wine at Communion.
As Chronos mentioned, wouldn’t it have been closer to matzah? I don’t know if you mean a leavened wheat bread.
Fascinating thread.
UMC here- no alcohol on church property ever (a temperance thing, I have always assumed) including wedding receptions, and unfermented grape juice for communion. I must ask my pastor if we use Welch’s! 
As an alcoholic, I can tell you that for me, one sip would be too much. Not that I would get drunk, but that the taste and sensation in my mouth would make me want lots more (and there was no barrier between “want” and “drink every drop you can find, goddammit” for me). And that’s really not a place I want to go.
If I was unable to use a non-alcoholic option, I would simply not partake.
I’m a compulsive overeater who is warned against “that first compulsive bite”. Luckily the host is nothing like any of my trigger foods.
The United Church of Christ (not the Church of Christ, a very different denomination!) does not have a set rule for whether wine or grape juice should be used at communion, but all the UCC churches I’ve been to (all from a Congregationalist heritage) use juice. This may have started as a temperance thing, but it most definitely is no longer justified as a temperance issue any longer. I know, because most of the parties we hold in church offer some sort of alcoholic beverage, such as
I believe for a lot of mainline Protestant churches, juice is usually used instead of wine mainly out of respect for recovering alcoholics or people who are allergic to alcohol, regardless of whether the tradition started with the temperance movement.
With no intention of “correcting” any previous information, (which has been pretty good), but to put “Catholic” stuff in a nice box for easy review:
From The General Instruction of the Roman Missal, Chapter VI
Note that whether it is leavened or unleavened is church tradition. The Eastern rites use leavened bread and there is no claim by the Latin church that their usage is any less sacred and priests travelling through areas that are predominantly of the other tradition who cannot secure the bread of their own tradition are permitted to use the other kind.
The only materials permitted in the bread are wheat and water. There have been discussions through the ages whether a bit of salt or a very small amount of a different grain might be acceptable additions. However, a safe bet is that only wheat and water are permitted. Different textures and flavors are produced, not by the addition of unapproved substances, but by milling the wheat more coarsely or more finely, adding more or less water, forming the bread into thicker or thinner loaves, or stamping them flat as in the old “cardboard” hosts I have not seen, thankfully, in a many long year. (This is not to say that no one is “cheating,” but I do know that there are a variety of breads available without cheating.)
The only material permitted in the wine is naturally fermented grape juice. (Varietals are not specified any more than the fineness of the ground wheat, so different flavors may be produced as long as they are not the result of injecting sugar, other fruits, or alcohol into the process.)
It is expected (I would say required, but I have not studied the nooks and crannies of that aspect of Canon case law), that both the bread and wine would be used to be consecrated into the Body and Blood at every Eucharistic celebration. The issue of either the host or the cup being sufficient for the Eucharist does not apply to the Consecration, but to the reception.
It would be true that an invalid consecration of something other than pure grape wine would not invalidate the consecration of the bread, (there is a formal procedure to handle accidentally “consecrating” a cup that contained only water without going back and re-consecrating the host), but such issues are more in line with exploring the ins and outs of law than in addressing the issues of theology.
For many years, only the host was distributed at Communion, but that decision was one of simple expediency in that it is easier to secure sufficient quantities of bread and easier to control the distribution of hosts than to involve equivalent portions of wine. Following Vatican II, as part of the general trend to employ ritual more fully to make the liturgical celebration more meaningful, the church began to encourage everyone to receive Communion under both species. (I was rather startled a few weeks ago to discover a parish that still distributed only the host as I had not been in a parish as either member or visitor that still used the more limited practice in over 35 years.)
Alcoholic priests may, on occasion, use mustum, but the general practice is to get them to use a tiny bit of genuine wine to which they mix a great deal of water.
Alcoholics in the congregation are simply urged to receive only the host, just as persons with celiac disease are urged to receive only from the cup. (The connection of wheat to celiac disease was only established in 1950. I do not know what Catholics did from 1950 to 1970, although with as few people who actually suffer the disease and the very small weight of the hosts of that period, it may have simply not been treated as an issue. While the church has decided on theological grounds that the rule regarding wheat in the host may not be modified with a substitute, the church has watched with interest efforts to develop a gluten-free wheat.)