Venezuela, without sacramental wine

Commodity shortages in Venezuela has affected the Catholic Church, in the absence of communion wine and flour to make wafers, analyzes reduce the number of Masses.

Commodity shortages in Venezuela has affected the Catholic Church, in the absence of communion wine and flour to make wafers, analyzes reduce the number of Masses, told Agence France-Presse Monsignor Baltazar Porras, bishop Merida state (West). "The reserve of wine we have in Merida is two or three months", while the hosts "very little for their high consumption and because the nuns that made extraordinarily difficult to get wheat flour," said Porras .

With the shortage of wafers and communion wine, parishioners are affected more than 10,000 churches in the country. Like many priests in the Andean region of Venezuela, the Venezuelan Catholic Church discusses, among some measures, buying wine and wafers in Cucuta, Colombia's state border with Venezuela, but consider that this does not solve the shortage in the country.

"If there are no elements to celebrate mass, we must decrease the Eucharist celebration, which would be really fatal," he said Porras. According to Bishop, a figure critical of the government of Nicolas Maduro, this situation did not occur in Venezuela since the mid nineteenth century.

The revocation of a tax exemption for domestic production of this wine has caused Bodegas Pomar, a subsidiary of Empresas Polar, the largest food producing country, has difficulty making the drink. Monsignor Porras criticized the government reversed the measure because "make production of a bottle of communion wine is very limited" and "generates prohibitively expensive" for the Church, which would pay about $ 16, equivalent to the cost of any variety of wine.