Since when is a sip of beer or wine a sin for a minor? It seems that all these situations have become black and white. Things that would not have been even venial sins in my youth have become “sins” of major proportion. When did we throw common sense out of the window?
I suppose it comes from attaching sins to violations of civil law.
It may be a sin to violate civil law in a certain matter, but civil law offences are not sins in their own right. In other words, no matter how good our government seems to be, even if the people in authority are all good Christians, they still have no power to declare, let alone make, some things sinful which were not sinful before.
As I see it, a sin from violating the law may grow with the gravity of the civil law offence under its law - as in the more outrageous the civil offence, the bigger the violation of the law, and therefore the bigger sin of violating the civil law. However, things can’t become sins in their own right just because they are outlawed by the civil law. So while underaged drinking might perhaps be sinful if the secular law in place forbids it, there’s no sin of underage drinking that I would know about.
Another concern of mine is that laws cannot be seen as a primary reality preceding sin. Sins are not divine sanctions attached to delicts proscribed by the chosen government. Surely, the laws will affect whose property something is, therefore whether the VII is violated, but the VII is not, “thou shalt not commit the crime of theft defined in statute N of your local law,” for example.
As for laws seen the purely secular way, by courts and by lawyers, there’s always the purpose of a rule - where literal reading leads to absurd, the purpose of the rule must be considered, as well as other circumstances. In short, those circumstances all come down to common sense. So while the authorities may have the right to ban a minor from downing a bottle of whisky, I have a problem with them banning a glass of wine to dinner, and most certainly just a trace of alcohol in a cake or a praline or whatever does not fall under the purpose of the law which aims to prevent minors from intoxicating themselves and getting addicted. No prosecutor or policeman in his sane mind would object to a minor eating a cake or chocolate praline with some alcohol unless perhaps it were used to develop a taste in alcohol not befitting the age.
