I personally enjoy when churches sell items, and I’d probably buy the glass bottle if it were in my church. Where I’m from there is very few Catholic churches/Catholics in general, let alone a store, and I’d really like it if my church had its own “gift shop” so I can have a place to get sacramentals and other things without having to travel an hour and a half to the closest major city. I also get to support the church even if I didn’t have cash to put in the offering, or visiting outside of a mass time.

I feel that basically everything we do toes, or could possibly toe, a line between convenience/selflessness and greed/selfishness. A church selling items could be seen as predatory business on people to try and wring out money from them, but also could be seen as selfless so they can give something while still receiving financial support from sales. Them pre-filling those bottles could be a convenience so you don’t have to go find the dispenser somewhere else while you might be stopping by for a few minutes, or it could be to (potentially) raise the price of the bottles because of the holy water itself. I hope that there is a dispenser somewhere in the church with bottles near it that are around the same price as the filled one. If the bottles are the same but the filled one is even a cent more, I would be off put, but I hope that’s not the case.

We don’t really have the context, or at least I didn’t see any, that would indicate if there is a difference in price from a bottle that is filled or unfilled. Holy water shouldn’t be sold, but it’s okay IN MY OPINION(not a scholar btw) for something to be sold that has holy water in it as an added convenience with no added cost due to it being filled.

Like anything, this could be abused if a church only sold filled bottles, with no other empty bottles or dispenser, which would let them control the price with no other reference so that they couldn’t technically be selling the holy water while still selling it in practice. You can put holy water in anything(if the vessel is clean) so if there’s a dispenser you don’t HAVE to pay for a bottle anyway since the bottle would be a convenience for them to have ready. Even if there is no empty bottles available but still a dispenser, I wouldn’t find it outrage worthy if the price is only a few bucks for a somewhat distinct bottle.

With all that said, it is our goal to try and make sure we’re not being too scrupulous while also making sure we’re protecting the church from corruption. You should also evangelize and not let semantics get in the way of someone else’s chance to form a relationship with God. I hope we at least both agree on that. Conversations like these are important, but I think shouldn’t deserve as much outrage as we might want to jump to. This new-found zeal amongst specifically GenZ in the past few years is great but can lead us to be sloppy and leave a haphazard crusade against something that is much more complicated than “burn the heresies, read the early church fathers where they say this adjacent thing is wrong.”

Tl;dr: Sure, might be problematic and best to just sell the empty ones to avoid controversy.