WHAT BISHOP CLEARY SAYS.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume XI, Issue 3363, 16 December 1919, Page 5

WHAT BISHOP CLEARY SAYS.

SACRAMENTAL WINE. In “The Month” Bishop Cleary writes as follows:——Many Catholics were, during the ‘last campaign, sincerely concerned lest National Prohition might result in rendering it impossible to secure the fermented Wine required for the Sacrifice of the Mass, the great central act of our Worship. With Catholics, such an apprehension ——whetller-well or ill grounded——was a natural expression of their faith and devotion. The peculiar feature or this fear was the extent"to which it ‘:was exploited by financial "interests to which Catholic’sr supreme act of worship has hitherto been apparently no more sacred than a.ga‘r'n’é“O‘f poker_ Was it the Walrus or the Carpenter that “wept like anytr.-Ifitg -rs §eé“’silcn quantities of sand’-’ upon the windswept shore? No matter. It seems to us that neither anxious Catholicism nor their troubled non-Catholic friends in the “Trade” need “weep like anything” over the matter of sacramental wine, in the event of National Prohibition taking N.Z. as it follows the westward track along which the Star of Empire takes its way. The N.Z. Licensing Amendment Act. of 1918, Section 19, sub-section 2 says:—— “Nothing in this section shall extend or apply to the importation, manufacture or sale in accordance with regulations made by the Governor-General in Council in‘ that lselialf,jof intoxicating liquor for medicinal, scientific, sacramental, or industrial purposes exclusively}? ’ A letter from the then I-lon. Attorney—General (Sir Francis Dillon Be-ll) conveys the substance of the proposed regulations in the proposed regulations in the following words:——“I ainauthorised by the Cabinet to state that, in the event of Prohibition being carried, regulations under subsection 2 of-section 19 of the Licensing Amendment Act (1918) will provide for the impdrtation by the several churches of wine for sacramental purposes, in such quantities as any church may require for lengthened periods, the ‘Churches being required, forgive sufficient security that the wine so imported shall not be used for other than sacramental purposes.”