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To: NYer
I am not Catholic. But I do have a legit question.

(In my parish, we stopped distributing the Precious Blood a couple years ago, during one of our big flu outbreaks, and the practice was never restored.)

Couldn't the priest put the wine (Holy Blood) in a spray bottle and squirt some in to the mouth? Is there a requirement that the wine must be drank from a goblet?
10 posted on 12/21/2015 8:24:13 PM PST by Organic Panic
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To: Organic Panic

Not a goblet — a chalice.


11 posted on 12/21/2015 8:27:29 PM PST by Salvation ("With God all things are possible." Matthew 19:26)
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To: Organic Panic

Here’s a good article that may help answer your question:

http://articles.earthlingshandbook.org/2014/11/12/the-common-cold-and-the-common-cup-does-communion-spread-germs/


16 posted on 12/22/2015 12:45:43 AM PST by Jack023
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To: Organic Panic

I can see why you may suggest this because it would seem at first blush to minimize the risk of the Precious Blood being spilled but there are a number of problems with your suggestion:

First, any kind of misting or atomizing device such as you suggest would in fact compound the danger of sacrilidge. Every fine droplet would be the Blood as much as any discernible taste or sip, and those fine droplets would have just as much of a tendency to float in air and float away as go into a mouth. So you could have potentially thousands of droplets of Blood going everywhere but where it’s intended.

Secondly, at the end of Mass such a device would invariably have some of the Blood still in the pumping mechanism of the device, so again there’s sacrilidge there as it would be difficult to dispose of the excess properly. Normally the excess must be either consumed, poured out into a special “sink” (the special name of which escapes me at the moment) that has a pipe that doesn’t go to the sewer or anywhere else but straight into the earth. Or it must be diluted with Holy Water and that dilution consumed. Typically that last portion is done by the priest at Mass as you see him “cleaning” the vessels. I suppose one could dilute what’s left in the pumping mechanism but it wouldn’t work very well as described above.

Thirdly and perhaps most important, it wouldn’t be very fitting to squirt Jesus through a sprayer as if He were some kind of disinfectant. We believe the Blood is as much His Body (and Blood) as the consecrated bread, so it’s literally Jesus present under the appearance of wine. It just wouldn’t be right to treat Him like some kind of air freshener. This is the Creator we are talking about here the Second Person of the Trinity.


19 posted on 12/22/2015 4:53:30 AM PST by FourtySeven (47)
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