What to do about the wine?

One of the unusual problems that Jules B. Jeanmard, first bishop of Lafayette, had to deal with shortly after his consecration 95 years ago this week was a thorny question about Prohibition.

Wine was a prohibited beverage during those days, but the law allowed pastors to buy enough for sacramental uses. The question was: How much is enough? And it appears from a letter he wrote in September 1921 that the young bishop, wine dealers, and some of the priests had different opinions.

The law allowed the use of alcoholic beverages for medicinal and sacramental uses, which opened a loophole for abuse. According to one estimate, doctors across the U.S. shared in $40 billion in sales in 1928 alone by writing prescriptions for whiskey for “medicinal use.”

Churches tested the law, too. In 1925, the Federal Council of Churches of Christ reported that “the withdrawal of wine on permit from bonded warehouses for sacramental purposes amounted in round figures to 2,139,000 gallons in … 1922; 2,593,500 gallons in 1923; and 2,944,700 gallons in 1924. There is no way of knowing what the legitimate consumption of fermented sacramental wine is, but it is clear that the legitimate demand does not increase 800,000 gallons in two years.”

Bishop Jeanmard took the position that “the interest of the Diocese and the good name of the Clergy demand that we avoid even the semblance of abuse of the concession made to us.” He urged priests to be conservative in the way they bought and used the wine. He apparently got some flak from some of his priests who cited a circular sent to the rectories that said they could get much more than the bishop seemed to want them to buy.

It turned out that the circular wasn’t exactly what it was purported to be, something Bishop Jeanmard found out when he asked federal Prohibition authorities about it. He said in a letter to the clergy of the diocese that he had asked for an “authoritative ruling” because of complaints that he had been “arbitrary” in his suggestion that purchases should be limited.

The director of prohibition in the New Orleans office wrote back to the bishop that neither his office nor officials in Washington had ever ruled that every priest was entitled to two barrels of Mass wine each year, as had been suggested in the circular.

“I beg to advise that this office has never made such a ruling,” the director wrote to the bishop, “I am confident there never has been such a ruling made by Washington; if so, I have not been advised of same. The circular is plainly an advertisement to secure orders for as large amounts of wine as possible. … I am firmly of the opinion that two barrels of wine is sufficient to last the head of any church in Louisiana … for sacramental purposes for a period of from five to ten years.”

The director continued, “It is presumed by the Department that the head of the church will base his order on the amount actually needed for the immediate future, say six months or a year, and not on the maximum quantity which he might be able to get.”

There was some grumbling, but the diocesan clergy generally followed the bishop’s directions until the end of Prohibition. That brought another problem to Bishop Jeanmard’s notice.

He felt compelled to write another letter on Jan. 2, 1934, after spirits were legal again, noting, “the repeal of Prohibition will probably flood the country with bad liquor. It is therefore all the more necessary for the clergy to be on their guard in the ordering of Mass wines. … Sacramental wines are to be ordered solely from religious communities which make such wines.”

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jhbradshaw@bellsouth.net or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.