A listener named Mike asks Father Dave about priests consuming the body and blood of Christ. “Father Dave said on the show [recently] that for a Mass to be valid, the priest has to consume both the body and blood of Christ — the bread and wine,” Mike begins. “What happens if a Catholic priest is recovering from alcohol addiction or can’t consume alcohol for medical reasons? Does he still have to consume the wine, or is there an exception in those circumstances?”
Father Dave begins, “It would not be out of the question for a priest to be in a 12-step recovery program, so not drinking alcohol at all. I do know some priests that are in recovery, will go to 12-step meetings on a regular basis, have a sponsor, but for them it’s not an issue, either physiologically or with the addiction, to have a sip [of wine at Mass]. Now that is not the case by any means for everybody.”
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“There does need to be some way to address this issue because, like Mike said, one might be recovering from alcohol addiction, or might be some other reason [such as] contraindication with a medication,” he continues. “This is not the first time this has come up in the history of the Catholic Church, so we did have to figure out something, and the answer is mustum.”
Father Dave explains, “Mustum is something that not a lot of people have heard of; I only have heard of it in the context of Mass and priests who can’t drink alcohol. Mustum is grape juice that has started to ferment. The fermentation process is stopped, usually by freezing, so that the alcohol level stays extremely low, usually under 1%…There’s enough alcohol content for the Church to consider it valid matter, but not enough for most any other purposes.” He compares it to low-gluten hosts that those with an allergy can consume.
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Father Dave describes the qualifications for wine or mustum to be valid for the Eucharist. “It has to be from grapes; it can’t be rice wine. It also can’t be chemically altered. A lot of non-alcoholic drinks these days undergo a sort of process that removes the alcohol — that wouldn’t be valid,” he says. “It has to be approved by the bishop and for a particular priest, and only for the priest. This doesn’t apply to lay people; so if you have an issue with wine, it is an option to just not receive from the cup.”
He underscores that a layperson is not “missing any experience” by only consuming the consecrated bread. “Christ is truly present — body, blood, soul, and divinity — in each and both of the consecrated species,” he says. “We realize that the Sacrament is not a one-to-one scientific correlation. This is a miraculous thing that happens, and Jesus is truly present in either or both. We call it the principle of concomitance; he exists concomitantly alongside in both species.”
