[vrish88]

I don’t see how this is Pharisaic in nature. The way I read it, the issue is: what is wine? The definition of a thing and debate around the definition is something that everybody does. Just remember the hot dog/sandwich war which took the lives of so many… Pharisaic concerns would be about nonessential things like the color of the bottle the wine is in, the cork or bottle cap, etc.

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...

[dctoedt]

Y'shua of Nazareth seemed not to have cared much, if at all, for formalities or strict definitions — see his answer, in Luke 10:25-37 [0], to the lawyer's question, what must I do to inherit eternal life? (TL;DR: Love God, love your neighbor — and your neighbor is everyone, even your enemy.)

[0] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+10%3A25-37...

[vrish88]

You are right, Jesus hated those Pharisaic formalities that prevented people from actual loving others. However Jesus did participate in other Jewish “formalities”. He celebrated the Passover, the festival of tents, he was presented at the temple, and so on.

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.

[dctoedt]

Please see my comment below [1], which I won't repost here.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36374781

[vrish88]

Beautiful! Yes, Jesus did give us the prime directive. However unlike the Pharisees he willing “to lift a finger” to help with them. He gave us his teaching. He gave us his Church. He gave us the Holy Spirit to live out the prime directive.

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.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Wine can of course be anything at all. It could be milk, or used motor oil, or hydrofluoric acid. It need not even be a liquid, or tangible. Wine could be a really bad poem by an amateur, or a class of neutron stars that astrophysicists have yet to discover.

Shame on the Catholic Church for trying to pin down a word so that it means one thing and one thing only.

[plorg]

The argument is not that the definition of wine is malleable (which it definitely can be without falling down your slippery slope), but that being picky about the definition misses the point of the Eucharist entirely.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Well, when Jesus was incarnated on Earth his primary focus was on how we just have to be loose with our definition of wine.

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.

[tptacek]

Again: I don't think this is a mainstream Catholic church thing. You'll see downthread people besides myself relating stories of priests consecrating Triscuits or wine parishioners brought back from trips. Eastern-Rite Catholics all use leavened bread, apparently.

Traditionalist Catholicism (tradcath-ism) is not the same religion as Roman Catholicism. It's a weird splinter thing.

[anon291]

Traditionalist catholics celebrate the mass as it always was. The new religion you are alluding to that would consecrate a triscuit is what is out of lines. You can't accuse a group that stays the same as creating a new religion while you consecrate snacks from the grocery store.

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.

[tptacek]

That's fine! Every religion has an intricate set of justifications for its practices and I generally respect them all. All I have to say about traditionalist Catholics is that they aren't mainstream Catholics.

[anon291]

This is like calling protestants mainstream Catholics because there are more aggregate protestants in the us than Catholics. At some point we must be clear as to definitions. If you start doing things like consecrating triscuits you are not Catholic. You can be whatever you like but it is simply dishonest to say you're Catholic. Anymore than the protestants are.

[michaelsbradley]

Why would what’s true and required about the Eucharist (at the most fundamental level) change from, say, 1923 to 2023?

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.

[pyuser583]

If you tried to sell a bottle of milk as wine, you’d get in trouble fast.

[gameshot911]

Wine is fermented grapes?

[pyuser583]

Just look at how much time EU devoted to defining all the different types of wine.

A thing is what it is.