I am not sure if our disagreement is about the facts or about my use of the word “largely”, which I admit may be an overstatement. At the time, temperance was at least widely believed to have significantly more support among women than men, and there was a lot of overlap between membership in women’s suffrage and temperance organizations, at least in Canada, with which I am a little bit more familiar than with the US. Men certainly also played an important role.
A couple of other points related to the topic: in Canada, the organization which came to be the main political force for prohibition – the Dominion Alliance for the Total Suppression of the Liquor Traffic–is said by the Canadian Encyclopedia to have “discouraged Francophone and Catholic participation”. Francophones ended up forming a separate organization --La Ligue Anti-alcoölique – which favored restriction rather than prohibition.
In the US, I know the Catholic church favored greater restrictions on the sale of alcohol, but I am not sure if it supported prohibition at the time. Did it have an official position?
I doubt that this is generally true. The French Revolution, after all, happened in Catholic France. And a common British prejudicial stereotype of those hot-headed Latin Catholic types is, or used to be, that they are forever having riots and coups d’etat and suchlike, as opposed to the staid solid sober respectable bourgeois Protestant nations of northern Europe.
Yes, before the reformation some parts of the church retained the practice of including the congregation: after the counter-reformation, some parts of the church returned to the practice of including the congretation.
The decision to not have a full meal at communion was an early decision of the church. The decision to not include the full congregation in recieving the wind was a late decision of the church, was controverisial at the time it was made, and was conterversial at the time of the reformation, but the ‘protestant sects’ didn’t invent the idea, it was a return to an existing thread of church thought.
[Quote=H.L.Mencken]
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
[/QUOTE]
Jokes aside though, Ireland is noted for sexual puritanism (although they still manage to have children) and the Roman Catholic church still maintains it’s own state: how much more close can the law and the church get than that?
And drinking was pretty much a Protestant thing too. The German Lutherans were strongly against prohibition, and seem to have been the backbone of opposition.
The USA at the time was pretty much a Protestant thing. Protestants were on both sides of the debate.
Pretty strong in AUS too. Formed the core of the successful movement to give votes to women. Up until recently there were still ‘Dry’ areas in my city, left over from the local-option, after federal prohibition didn’t get up.
My Catholic experience: Communion at every Mass, so normally every week. All who have had First Communion* (generally everybody age 7 or older) can participate, and most do unless they choose not to. This “denying of Communion” thing that comes up when some Bishop gets blustery seems hard to enforce, in my experience. Red wine and discrete, circular pieces unleavened bread. Made you feel real cool at 7.
My Methodist experience: Communion is sometimes. Like quarterly, at max, and the occurrence seemed arbitrary to me (but probably wasn’t, but not always on holy days etc.). Grape juice and chunks of bread torn off a loaf (slightly sweet in my memory).
*Generally Catholic only but I believe Anglicans and Orthodox practices are considered more “kosher” than Protestant.
The increase in Orthodoxy is because Estonia and Latvia (not so much Lithuania) have had a huge influx of Russian immigrants, who are ethnically and mostly culturally separate.
I agree, attitudes caused them to abandon wine. Welch’s grape juice was founded by a Wesleyan minister. Despite the history, the United Methodist Church doesn’t seem to take a strong moral stance against alcohol these days like some Evangelicals do.
Some Protestants have claimed that Jesus and the Apostles drank grape juice, or at least the near beer equivalent of wine. That of course flies in the face of all common sense.
More than the Holy See? Well, the Papal States, when they had a good chunk of Italy real power! And also their own Holy Roman Empire, except that was a really dysfunctional relationship.
Sexual puritanism in Ireland (or anywhere else) doesn’t necessarily mean that puritan attitudes toward sex are being enforced through civil law, though, and it’s the latter which is the subject of this thread.
As it happens, though, despite being a Catholic country Ireland does display a a somewhat “Protestant” attitude to enforcing sexual morality through law - e.g. prostitution is subject to heavy legal restrictions, and Ireland was very late in deregulating the sale of contraceptives. But Ireland is part of the Anglosphere plus, of course, its legal and political culture in particular is largely inherited from Britain. So my thesis would be that Ireland does these things despite being a Catholic country, not because of it.
As for the Vatican City State, that’s a bit of a red herring in this context. The purpose of the Vatican State is to secure the political independence of the papacy. It doesn’t distinguish itself by enforcing morality through its laws - it adopts the Italian Criminal Code by reference. Even when the Vatican controlled a fair chunk of central Italy, it didn’t distinguish itself by attempts to enforce morality through law - there was no prohibition of alcohol, for example, prostitution was not a crime and brothels were licensed and operated openly. The Papal States may have been a theocracy, but they were not a puritan one.
Sexual puritanism my ass, at least from the PoV of my 15yo self. Those people went behind the pub at a wink, and had serious problems understanding that most of us Frenchs and Spaniards did not (we had a group from Asturias who was as bad as the Irish).
Because the question was about Protestant vs. Catholic attitudes. I believe, although I am not sure, that the restriction of sacramental wine to priests was motivated largely by practical, economic considerations prior to the Reformation, but took on something of a doctrinal edge after that.
I wasn’t clear. I meant the direct descendants: the various Lutheran synods and the Anglican/Episcopalian churches continue to drink wine at communion, not grape juice.
The original suggestion in this thread was that attitudes toward Prohibition in various countries might have been influenced by the Roman Catholic Church making a broader ritualistic use of wine than Protestant churches. Subsequent responses were suggesting that that may not be the case, pointing out that for most of the last few hundred years (from at least the Council of Trent to Vatican II), Catholic services typically restricted the drinking of the wine to just the priest, while many Protestant sects served wine to the whole congregation.
I wouldn’t disagree. However, use of alcohol is a personal decision/choice. Slavery and limiting the vote are not. I am not arguing any relative merits of the issues, just that drinking/prohibition does not equate to slavery/abolition or limited/universal suffrage.
Ireland of course also banned divorce, entirely, until 1995. It wasn’t the only Catholic country to do so, which suggests that maybe talking about ‘puritanism’ vs. ‘non-puritan’ wholesale, is sort of an oversimplification. Protestant countries have traditionally been more lax about some things (divorce, contraception) while being more strict about things like prostitution, out-of-wedlock childbearing*, alcohol, etc.
*Ireland is again an exception here, as Irish culture famously took an extremely harsh view towards sex and childbearing outside of marriage: I’m thinking more about Latin American countries here.
Nor does abortion. Or gay rights. Or a million other issues, which nevertheless have had a very large religious component of what was considered morally right and wrong and which had (and have) large societal effects.
Outside a libertarian fantasy world, there is no possibility of separating out moral issues this way. One can have a personal belief that certain issues fall on one side or the other, but shouldn’t have any expectation that the larger society will pay any attention.
The issue, though, is not about whether people have a very strict moral code or a more relaxed one, but rather to what extent they seek to enforce whatever moral code they have through civil law.
The Catholic tradition regards divorce as always wrong, and furthermore sees it as a societal issue. (And I think a good case can be made for the latter view.) And it’s the second element which, from the Catholic perspective, makes civil legislation restricting or limiting divorce justifiable and/or desirable. It wouldn’t be justifiable merely because divorce is wrong.
Whereas the Protestant moral tradition doesn’t regard divorce as intrinsically wrong. Hence even a Protestant who considers that the law should enforce morality will not expect the law to forbid divorce, since divorce isn’t presumptively immoral.
I think to examine the different Protestant and Catholic attitudes to the use of civil law to enforce morality, you need to look at issues on whose morality Catholics and Protestants are in broad agreement - e.g. prostitution, adultery, drunkenness. And on those issues, legal prohibition is more likely to be resorted to in historically Protestant or Protestant-influenced societies than in Catholic or Catholic-influenced societies. And - I think not by coincidence - this reflects the dominant perspectives in Catholicism and Protestantism respectively about civil power and what it should be used for.
You see a lot of alcoholism among priests though, (in fact, it’s been a real problem in the church), but alcohol isn’t considered a sin in Catholicism. (Getting drunk and then being a dick is, obviously, but that’s true even among the non-religious)
And sacramental wine can’t be poured down the drain. The priest, or his deacons or other functionaries must consume it. Or the altar boys sneak it. Being a teetotaling alcoholic is not a detriment to being a priest, but normally it involves drinking some amount of wine at a time when the only acceptable drinks are mimosas and bloody marys.
I believe they have a cistern or a well, that goes straight into the ground. (As opposed to the sewers)* And there are instances where a priest is permitted to drink non-alcoholic wine if he must for various medical reasons.
*A friend of mine said the reason he became an altar boy when he was a kid was because the priest at their church let the altar boys finish the leftover communion wine.
