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Monetizing the body of Christ [1]

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Date: 2025-01-12

Sunday school pop quiz: who baked the last communion wafer you received? If you haven’t partaken of communion in years or decades, you might have received a communion wafer baked by nuns. But if you received communion this morning, you might have received a communion wafer baked by the Cavanagh Company.

That company now has almost a complete monopoly on communion wafers for American churches, according to an article by Mark Dent for The Hustle which I read through Firefox Pocket.

According to Catholic teaching, communion wafers are not symbols of the body of Jesus Christ. Rather, they are ordinary wafers which are transformed into the actual body of Jesus Christ through the power of the communion sacrament. The concept is called “transubstantiation,” but a lot of Catholics who believe everything else the church teaches find this concept hard to swallow.

Whether or not you believe in transubstantiation, it is worthwhile to examine where these wafers are coming from prior to the sacrament.

Back in 1910, the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in Clyde, Missouri,

started producing communion wafers — “an almost ideal type of work for cloistered, contemplative communities,” [Sister Ruth] Starman said. By the 1920s, hundreds of orders of nuns, from the Poor Clares to the Passionists to the Sisters Magdalens, were also making bread, usually just enough to sustain living expenses and keep local churches stocked.

Any excess profit probably went to the general church fund. Can you imagine anyone in the corporate world using the adjective “excess” to refer to profit?

Dent focuses on the Benedictine Sisters because they really went above and beyond, mentioning, for example, a 1927 order for a million wafers for a Eucharist Congress in Chicago.

The work was never easy. For the first half of the 20th century, they cut each host individually. During the Christmas and Easter season, when far more Christians attended church services, the nuns would be up until midnight, baking away.

However, by my understanding of Catholic doctrine, those who only come to church for Easter and Christmas should probably not be partaking of communion. At a minimum, you should come to mass one Sunday prior not taking communion. I do understand that it would be wrong to try to enforce this, it really should be on the honor system.

Do they give communion on other days of the week? I actually didn’t know, I guess I assumed they do.

It turns out that long ago communion was only offered once a month. By the time of my childhood, I took it for granted that communion was offered every Sunday.

Inventor and businessman John F. Cavanagh was, I presume, a congregant at a Catholic church in Rhode Island. Perhaps worried the nuns would not be able to scale altar bread production for weekly communion, a priest asked Cavanagh to invent a machine that would help the nuns make more communion wafers quicker.

Figure 3 from U. S. Patent application 2,520,997, a baking unit for communion wafers by John F. Cavanagh. The patent application states that "The under surface of the upper baking plate 15 may be provided with any suitable symbols or designs, indicated at D in Fig. 3, to be baked into the sheet of bread."

Cavanagh obliged, and in 1947 he applied for a patent for a “baking unit,” 2,520,997. Several convents purchased the Cavanagh Baker. Nuns continued making the wafers, now aided by Cavanagh’s invention.

Maybe Cavanagh was perfectly happy just selling his patented invention, perhaps it being more valuable to him for helping him gain eternal salvation than for whatever short-term earthly gains it brought him.

But his sons, John Jr. and Paul, had different ideas. By only providing the baking units, the Cavanagh Company was leaving money on the table, so to speak. By actually making the altar bread, the company would earn profit on a periodic basis, instead of just once each time a baking unit was purchased.

The elder son

wrote a letter to the Benedictine Sisters’ Illinois community in 1955, saying they had gotten approval from their local bishop in Rhode Island to start wafer production. He said he wanted to supplement nuns’ work, not compete with them. In the letter, which was provided to The Hustle, he also suggested it would be “impractical for nuns to purchase, operate, and maintain” increasingly large and complex machinery. The nuns weren’t so sure it was a good idea. The Benedictine Sisters’ leader, Mother Mary Carmelita, wrote back, saying they “could not encourage” the company’s proposal. “We could never think of turning over so sacred a trust to have it done on a commercial basis,” she wrote.

The Cavanagh brothers pushed ahead, producing 50 million wafers in 1956. Production is probably in the billions by now. I can’t tell you prices. The order form for the 29-millimeter wafers, for example, lets me see that I could buy them in cases of 20,000 or 40,000, and I can get them in packets, rolls or containers. But I have to be a registered distributor before they’ll let me see any prices.

To be fair, the Cavanagh Company made improvements to the wafers. They’re said to taste better and are less likely to crumble prior to receipt. Some of them feature some very nice designs, like the 35mm Lamb.

As Cavanagh’s business increased, most convents — many of which suffered from declining enrollment and found it harder to sustain their extracurricular businesses — stopped baking wafers. [...] Those that stopped altar bread production often started working with Cavanagh, buying wafers wholesale and selling them to parishes. (Cavanagh does not sell directly to Catholic churches.) Despite the collegial relationship, some nuns coped with a loss of livelihood and a feeling of powerlessness against a budding monopoly. As the Franciscan Poor Clares of Brenham, Texas, explained on their now-defunct website, according to a story by writer Rowan Moore Gerety, Cavanagh, “that big monstrous secular competition,” was always a step ahead. “They made whole-wheat breads. We learned to make whole-wheat breads. They made theirs a fraction larger. We had a machine built that would cut them larger. They made theirs a little thicker, with a cross incised in the middle. We couldn’t copy that,” wrote the nuns.

They could copy the mass marketing tactics, to an extent. The Benedictine Sisters asked “every bishop in the United States to consider buying breads from religious communities.” When Pope John Paul II came to Denver in 1993, the communion wafers were produced by the Benedictine Sisters, not the Cavanagh Company.

Cavanagh may have had the advantages in marketing, pricing, and packaging, but the nuns separated themselves by emphasizing the traditional, religious style of their work. “Our slogan [was] ‘Made by consecrated hands,’” said Sister Jane Heschmeyer.

As awareness of gluten allergies increased, both the Cavanagh Company and the Benedictine Sisters faced the challenge of how to make low-gluten wafers (this sidetracked me with the communion dance scene from L’Immensita). Sister Lynn D’Souza, educated at Texas A & M, was able to come up with the solution.

Eventually, D’Souza discovered a mix that wasn’t too sticky and was just airy enough. It met the requirements of the Roman Catholic Church, and the Baking Institute of America found it contained less than 0.001% gluten. The Benedictine Sisters had once again found another way to differentiate themselves: They started to produce the world’s first low-gluten communion wafer approved by the church.

The coronavirus pandemic brought another challenge. Without in-person mass, demand for communion wafers vanished.

The nuns halted production and furloughed their employees. (Being friendly nuns, they continued to pay the workers, despite them not working any hours.)

I somehow doubt the Cavanagh Company even thought of doing the same.

Churches reopened to the public as the coronavirus shifted from pandemic to endemic. The Benedictine Sisters still make low-gluten wafers, but for regular wafers they distribute Cavanagh product.

One hopes the Cavanagh Company will always prioritize honor and duty before profit. But it’s a private company, so who knows.

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