Wine & The Eucharist

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Some churches I have been to don’t seem to have any wine present. The bread is not dipped in wine, there is no chalice of wine to be sipped, etc. Is that appropriate?
 
Some churches I have been to don’t seem to have any wine present. The bread is not dipped in wine, there is no chalice of wine to be sipped, etc. Is that appropriate?
Body and Blood of Christ, not bread and wine.

Now on to your question, the Body, Blood, Soul and divinity are fully present in either species. The Priest is required to consume both species but both species are not required to be offered to the laity.
 
The catechism of the catholic Church is clear on this at no 1390: Since Christ is sacramentally present under each of the species, communion under the species of bread alone makes it possible to receive all the fruit of Eucharistic grace. For pastoral reasons this manner of receiving communion has been legitimately established as the most common form in the Latin rite. But "the sign of communion is more complete when given under both kinds, since in that form the sign of the Eucharistic meal appears more clearly." (my emphasis) This is the usual form of receiving communion in the Eastern rites.

I hope this helps - discuss it with the liturgy committee in your parish
 
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GUYMAN:
Some churches I have been to don’t seem to have any wine present. The bread is not dipped in wine, there is no chalice of wine to be sipped, etc. Is that appropriate?
Body and Blood of Christ, not bread and wine.

Now on to your question, the Body, Blood, Soul and divinity are fully present in either species. The Priest is required to consume both species but both species are not required to be offered to the laity.
You said " Body and Blood of Christ, not bread and wine." but the CCC 1390 refers to the species of bread
 
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You said " Body and Blood of Christ, not bread and wine. " but the CCC 1390 refers to the species of bread
The OP just refers to bread and wine. I wanted to be clear that they are not merely bread and wine.
 
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Some churches I have been to don’t seem to have any wine present. The bread is not dipped in wine, there is no chalice of wine to be sipped, etc. Is that appropriate?
Is wine being consecrates but not distributed? Or does the priest not even consecrate the wine and drink from the cup?

The cup doesn’t need to be distributed to the laity, that is up to the bishop, but to my knowledge the priest should still be consecrating and partaking of both species.
 
The priest always consecrates both the bread, and the wine
 
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If there is literally no wine present to become the Precious Blood and for the priest to receive, the Mass is at least gravely irregular. (I’m not sure if it’s possible to consecrate just bread — maybe in an emergency? — but it’s certainly not normal.

If you mean that the chalice is present on the altar and is consecrated, but is not offered to the laity, that is a well-established practice, though not one I have actually seen. It was the norm for several centuries but seems less so now. That is entirely permissible and does not lessen what the communicant receives, though as Uriel notes the sign value of the sacrament is enhanced when both species are offered.
 
If there is literally no wine present to become the Precious Blood and for the priest to receive, the Mass is at least gravely irregular. (I’m not sure if it’s possible to consecrate just bread — maybe in an emergency? — but it’s certainly not normal.
Both species must be consecrated.
 
The priest always consecrates both the bread, and the wine, and at CCC [1333] it reads, At the heart of the Eucharistic celebration are the bread and wine that, by the words of Christ and the invocation of the Holy Spirit, become Christ’s Body and Blood . Faithful to the Lord’s command the Church continues to do, in his memory and until his glorious return, what he did on the eve of his Passion: “He took bread. . . .” “He took the cup filled with wine. . . .” The signs of bread and wine become, in a way surpassing understanding, the Body and Blood of Christ; they continue also to signify the goodness of creation. Thus in the Offertory we give thanks to the Creator for bread and wine,154 fruit of the “work of human hands,” but above all as “fruit of the earth” and “of the vine” - gifts of the Creator. The Church sees in the gesture of the king-priest Melchizedek, who “brought out bread and wine,” a prefiguring of her own offering.
 
From what I recall wine is being consecrated. Whether required or not I don’t see why it should be withheld from the parishoners. Its consecrated and then we don’t consume it ??
 
Not a big fan of using grape juice instead of wine. I have seen this in the past, but it is typically driven by an unscriptural hang up against alcohol, or concerns for those who choose not to drink alcohol due to health or substance abuse concerns.
 
My mistake, I was thinking she was talking about using grape juice instead of wine. I guess she meant receiving communion in one kind. I would say this is pretty much as unfaithful as using grape juice.
 
When I was really young - elementary school - my family lived in a really small town. The priest administered communion alone. He did consecrate bread and wine into the Body and Blood at the altar, but only distributed the transfigured Bread, for logistical reasons. Also to this day, I rarely take the Blood, probably because it wasn’t available during the time when I developed the habit of taking communion.
 
The Catechism of the Catholic Church is clear on this at no 1390
Google CCC 1390 and read the paragraph

If you want, what the CCC calls, the more complete sign (at Communion), discuss it with your priest and he might be able to provide both species
 
Yes, as long as the priest uses wine himself during the Consecration, it’s perfectly acceptable to offer Holy Communion to the congregation in just the one form of bread.

For most of my childhood, the Precious Blood was almost never offered to the congregation. Only on very special occasions like First Communion. In those days they also did not have EMHCs like they do now.

Nowadays some churches don’t offer the Precious Blood because they don’t have enough EMHCs to hold cups or, more recently, because there was a concern about transmitting the flu going around via the cup. Almost every church I attend discontinued the cup over last flu season, and it’s not normal around here to intinct (dip) the Host either because most people receive in the hand and that’s not possible when you do intinction.
 
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There is actually a type of “grape juice”, but it has to be natural (unprocessed). It is called mustum from the Latin vinum mustum (“young wine”.) It is basically on its way to becoming wine when the fermentation process gets suspended.

In 1994 Cardinal Ratzinger signed a letter to be promulgated by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith allowing ordinaries to grant special permission to priests affected by “alcoholism or other conditions which prevent the ingestion of even the smallest quantity of alcohol” to use mustum instead of wine. But presentation of a medical certificate is prerequisite to any permission being granted.
 
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