On The Host in the Modern World

Abstract

This article traces the contemporary history of the eucharistic host, arguing that the materiality of modern Catholicism offers a distinct set of insights into the ways in which the Catholic Church has negotiated, resisted, and accommodated the modern world. Drawing on archival work, writings from a range of early twentieth-century Catholic journals, and advertising campaigns for altar bread, I show how shifting theological convictions about the Eucharist transformed both the form of altar bread as well as how and by whom it was made. Long before the Second Vatican Council, efforts to increase lay reception of communion as a strategy to mobilize Catholics against modernity had the effect of increasing demand for the bread on which it depended. After the Council, new convictions about the need for more intelligible liturgical symbols were accompanied by demands for a new kind of bread. Taken together, I argue that these factors unwittingly contributed to the creation of a new economy of host production. While the relationship between the church and the modern world remains one of the most enduring tensions in modern Catholicism in the wake of Vatican II, I show how both before and after the Council, the Catholic Church was deeply enmeshed in and dependent upon that world to achieve its ends.

Shortly after their arrival in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century, a community of Poor Clare Sisters from Cuba took up a practice that was by then common among many communities of women religious in the United States: baking altar bread for nearby parishes. At first providing their hosts to their local Diocese of Corpus Christi, they soon counted most of the parishes in nearby Austin among their customers as well. But just two decades after launching and expanding their altar bread ministry, the Poor Clares were struggling to stay afloat. A rapid increase in demand for eucharistic bread, intensifying calls from liturgical reformers for new kinds of bread, and growing competition from private business all put pressure on the sisters at a time when vocations to their community were already beginning to decline. Exasperated by the growing dominance of their largest competitor—Cavanagh Company of Greenville, Rhode Island—the sisters grieved their inability to compete in the rapidly changing market for hosts:

The Cavanagh Company, that big monstrous secular competition, began changing their breads. 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. And they had the audacity to send samples and a price list to every parish in the United States! We were doomed. Priests started calling to say they preferred the “other” breads. Orders dropped. Our spirits drooped. . . . Obviously, our breads were no longer wanted.¹

Uncertain about the future of their labors, the community held a meeting to pray for guidance, a meeting that would ultimately lead to their decision to stop producing altar breads altogether. We “shook hands with the enemy,” they would later write, “and began buying Cavanagh's breads, repackaging them as necessary to fill our church's needs.”²

The fate of the Poor Clares testifies to a dramatic shift that took place in both the form and the fabrication of altar bread in the United States in the twentieth century. At the beginning of the century, host making was largely the domain of small communities of women religious who made small, paper-thin, white hosts that had been in use in the global West since at least the thirteenth century. By the end of the twentieth century, altar bread production had become the near-exclusive domain of a single private business that made and marketed an array of hosts to suit a wide range of theological convictions about the Eucharist.

Debates about the meaning and legacy of the Second Vatican Council have largely centered on close readings of its authoritative documents structured by a range of binary interpretative lenses.³ But recent scholarship has stressed the need for lived histories of the Council that take seriously the social, political, and religious circumstances that inevitably shaped its reception at the local level.⁴ The significance of Vatican II, argue Kathleen Sprows Cummings, Timothy Matovina, and Robert Orsi, is best examined “at the combustive points where the Council's messages, aspirations, and fears, explicit and implied, intended and unintended met up most explosively with the particular circumstances of the modern world.”⁵ Among the many insights close-grained histories of the Council have the potential to disclose is the way in which lived practices—in all their ironies, contradictions, unpredictability, and contingencies—complicate tidy binaries about the relationship between the pre- and postconciliar church.

One of the most enduring binary interpretations of the pre- and postconciliar church is found in appraisals of the church's relationship to the modern world. What precisely the Catholic Church has meant when it has evoked the “modern world” and “modernity” is far from univocal. Before Vatican II, as the church was increasingly forced to contend with challenges to its authority throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, “modernity” in ecclesiastical documents seemed to serve as a signpost for almost anything in the world that did not match an idealized vision of medieval Christendom: the secular state, religious pluralism, the privatization of religion, social fragmentation, totalitarianism, the individualism associated with capitalist economies, free scientific inquiry, materialism, modern markets, and more.⁶ The modern world was, in a sense, simply the world outside the church, and the church increasingly defined itself as a counter-society to that world. The documents of Vatican II represent a dramatic reappraisal of the church's relationship with that same modern world. Adopting an attitude of solidarity and dialogue toward the world, Gaudium et spes—Vatican II's Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World—acknowledged with appreciation a wide range of modern achievements the church had previously rejected. In light of this dramatic shift in tone toward the modern world, an enduring interpretation of the shift from the pre- to postconciliar church is one that sees a church radically opposed to the modern world before the Council and newly open to engagement with it in its wake. Such an interpretation endures in part because of the nebulous understandings of modernity on which both ecclesiastical condemnations and embraces of modernity have relied. But even more, it endures because it fails to attend to the messy materiality of religious practice that has the potential to yield more complicated understandings of the church's relationship to the world both before and after the Council.

This article traces the contemporary history of the eucharistic host to argue that the materiality of Catholicism offers a distinct set of insights into the complex and even contradictory ways in which the church negotiated, resisted, and accommodated the modern world. Relative to accounts of the nature and substance of the host after its eucharistic transformation into the Body of Christ, scholars have paid little attention to the significance of the materiality and material processes on which that transformation depends.⁷ Drawing on archival work, writings from a range of early twentieth-century Catholic journals, and advertising campaigns for altar bread, I show how shifting theological convictions about the Eucharist transformed both the form of altar bread as well as how and by whom it was made. Long before the Second Vatican Council, efforts to increase lay reception of communion as a strategy to mobilize Catholics against the modern world had the effect of increasing demand for the bread on which it depended. After the Council, new convictions about the need for more intelligible liturgical symbols resulted in demands for a new kind of bread. But both before and after the Council, the practice at the heart of Catholic identity—the Eucharist—was deeply enmeshed in and dependent upon the structures of the modern world to achieve its ends, unwittingly contributing to the decimation of convent bread making and strengthening eucharistic dependence on a modern market.

Supply and Demand

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Pope Pius X reversed hundreds of years of eucharistic practice by increasing dramatically the regular reception of communion among Catholic laity. While lay reception of communion was exceedingly rare from the thirteenth century forward,⁸ Pius unequivocally encouraged not merely frequent but even daily practice of receiving the Eucharist at Mass: “[T]he faithful should be invited to the sacred banquet as often as possible, even daily, and should benefit by its most abundant fruits,”⁹ exhorted the Pope in his 1905 decree Sacra Tridentina Synodus. “Frequent and daily Communion, as a practice most earnestly desired by Christ our Lord and by the Catholic Church, should be open to all the faithful . . . so that no one who is in the state of grace, and who approaches the Holy Table with a right and devout intention . . . can be prohibited therefrom.”¹⁰ Pius followed this decree in quick succession with a range of others intended to support and even reward the practice of frequent communion.¹¹ The increase in communion frequency among lay Catholics effected by Pius's efforts is perhaps the most significant and enduring liturgical reform of the twentieth century prior to Vatican II.¹²

While Pius's drive for more frequent communion reflected his own eucharistic piety as well as developments in eucharistic theology over the course of the nineteenth century,¹³ it also served as a vital strategy in accomplishing one of the central aims of his papacy: to mobilize the faithful in a rapidly changing world to oppose modernity aggressively. “[T]his practice, so salutary and so pleasing to God,” exhorted the pope, should “everywhere be promoted, especially in these days when religion and the Catholic faith are attacked on all sides, and the true love of God and piety are so frequently lacking.”¹⁴ Indeed, the rhetoric both of Pius's campaign for frequent communion and of those who embraced it in the decades that followed was often deeply antisecular.¹⁵ “Today we are surrounded by . . . enemies, bitterly opposed to our faith and eager to destroy not our bodies but our immortal souls,” wrote an American priest in support of Pius's efforts to increase communion. “If the present century surpasses in many respects the godless and immoral age in which the first Christians lived, we ought to seek strength and protection where they did, at the Lord's Table.”¹⁶ In a time when the very plausibility of the church was being called into question, the movement to intensify eucharistic reception served as an essential “defensive offensive” against modernity.¹⁷

In the United States, clergy responded enthusiastically to Pius's efforts.¹⁸ The pages of U.S. ecclesiastical, pastoral, and scholarly journals in the early twentieth century are saturated with practical strategies to “multiply the number of Communions.”¹⁹ Reflecting on the challenges of ministry in the rural areas of his state, for example, a Michigan priest laid out a “Mission Plan” that offered concrete suggestions for increasing reception that included everything from offering more convenient daily Masses to issuing personal appeals directly to individual parishioners.²⁰ An Indiana priest argued that celebrants could increase reception by being more scrupulous about the cleanliness of the vessels from which the Eucharist was distributed and the tidiness of the sacristy in which they were prepared: “How can [the people] avoid observing that the paten, which the server holds for them at Holy Communion, has not been washed for days and days?”²¹ Another cleric's suggestions included increasing reception by the priest being punctual: “How many communions are lost because Father so-and-so was late?”²² Pragmatic advice like this only begins the list of suggestions large and small from priests across the country dedicated to obtaining the “maximum number of Communions.”²³

Catholic laity, too, mobilized to support these efforts. From the “Knights of the Blessed Sacrament”²⁴ to “Communion Gangs,”²⁵ a series of organizations emerged that turned their efforts toward increasing reception.²⁶ The “Frequent Communion Guild” in Chicago, for example, offered a three-tiered membership: the first for those who received once a week, the second for those who received twice a week, and the third for those who received daily.²⁷ The “Apostleship of Prayer” incorporated communion breakfasts as a means to draw more men to the table.²⁸ Even individual Catholic leaders played a central role in fostering increased reception. John O'Hara, the prefect and later president of the University of Notre Dame, for example, was the originating force in a tradition of daily communion at the university that endures to this day.²⁹ “By receiving Communion frequently you will be better men, better students, better athletes,” exhorted the prefect.³⁰ For O'Hara as for many eucharistic organizations founded throughout the early twentieth century, reception of the Eucharist was a key strategy in helping young people—and especially young men—resist the dangers of the modern world.³¹

Yet despite such confident assertions, a frequent lack of clarity on what precisely in the modern world needed resisting lived in tension with the fact that an increase in demand for eucharistic bread stimulated by these efforts increasingly found Catholics turning to a modern, private, secular market to procure it.³² Eucharistic bread making had long been the work of communities of women religious that baked bread for nearby parishes.³³ But already by 1919, outside entities began to emerge in greater numbers to supply altar breads in the face of growing demand for hosts. “The inconvenience which many pastors find in having the hosts baked,” said an article at the time, “has led to a new species of traffic by which the making of altar breads is commercialized.”³⁴ No longer solely baked within the confines of the diocese, hosts are now “baked in large quantities by religious or others, and distributed to vicars forane, deans, and pastors, who in turn distribute them to priests.”³⁵ Within two decades of the launch of a decidedly antimodern campaign for more frequent communion, the baking of altar breads was on its way to becoming a modern commercial enterprise.

The commercialization of altar bread began to raise old questions about the purity of communion hosts in new ways. Concern about the adulteration of bread flour in Europe had preoccupied clerics since the late nineteenth century.³⁶ The Tridentine Missal of 1570 decreed that if altar bread was not made of wheat flour or if it was adulterated in any way, the sacrament was invalid.³⁷ Any adulteration, in other words, risked invisibly jeopardizing the Eucharist. Growing alarm about the theological implications of adulterated flour became so widespread that the Vatican's Congregation for the Discipline of the Sacraments was forced to issue a statement in response to them. The Vatican's statement chastised the “perversity of some dishonest merchants” who adulterated the flour used for the fabrication of eucharistic hosts with extraneous ingredients.³⁸ The preoccupations of the myriad articles that appeared in U.S. clerical journals throughout the first half of the twentieth century in response to these concerns can be summed up in the words of the Bishop Camillus P. Maes of Covington, Kentucky: “The very existence of the Blessed Sacrament is at stake.”³⁹ As the “danger of commercial enterprise” in altar bread making continued to grow in the United States, such concerns only intensified, prompting calls for greater ecclesiastical supervision and regulation in the fabrication of hosts to safeguard the sacredness of the Eucharist.⁴⁰

Equally troubling to American clerics was whether or not commercialized bread was sufficiently fresh. Canon Law stated that the bread for the Eucharist be “recently made” and “frequently renewed . . . so that there is no danger of corruption.”⁴¹ Since the sixteenth century, “recently made” had been interpreted as “weekly” and hosts were to be consecrated within twenty days of manufacture.⁴² But the emerging practice of purchasing bulk quantities of altar bread from an outside vendor once every two or three months risked leading to invalid bread:

In thus saving the individual priest the trouble of having his supply of altar breads made, there is danger of irreverence and invalid consecration, and, besides the rubrics of the Ritual and the prescriptions of Canon Law are violated. The latter ordain that the particles to be consecrated be fresh . . . ; that is to say, they should be not older than a week or at most two. In like manner the Sacred Hosts are to be renewed frequently; that is to say, every week or at most two.⁴³

In a statement, the Congregation for the Discipline of the Sacraments explicitly rejected the practice. Priests procuring their hosts from vendors every few months, argued the Congregation, was a violation of Canon Law because the bread could not be considered to be “recently” made.⁴⁴

But demand and convenience ultimately eclipsed even the starkest statements from the Vatican on the matter; by the middle of the twentieth century, a burgeoning “altar bread industry” was already expanding. The pages of The Ecclesiastical Review—one of the most widely read journals for Catholic clergy in the early twentieth century—had long been filled with articles rejecting the bulk purchase of altar bread.⁴⁵ But already in the first decade of the second half of the century, the journal showed clear signs of softening to the practice. “We now have a process whereby altar bread can be kept fresh and incorrupt for months or even for years,”⁴⁶ wrote the editor in response to a question about the increasing purchase of hermetically sealed, mass-produced hosts. While he acknowledged a difficulty “from the standpoint of canon law,” he nevertheless argued that “by a reasonable interpretation of . . . Church laws, which supposed that the hosts were kept without any scientific measures for preserving them for corruption, we can hold that it is lawful to use hosts that have been preserved in the way described by the questioner.”⁴⁷ Indeed, the editor of the Review was giving cautious affirmation of a practice that was becoming the primary method by which American parishes procured their altar bread.

It is in this milieu that the seeds of the first large-scale private producer of altar bread in the United States were planted.⁴⁸ Worried about the toll the production of altar bread was taking on convents and concerned about the disrepair of their equipment, a priest turned to businessman, inventor, and liturgical artist John F. Cavanagh for help. Cavanagh agreed to assist and soon began servicing a wide range of altar bread-making equipment from across the country. Requests for everything from the sharpening and adjusting of hand cutters to the replating of baking plates testify to the urgent need for the new service Cavanagh was providing.⁴⁹ By the early 1950s, the Cavanagh warehouses were “crammed with mixing and baking machines from all over the country.”⁵⁰ Within a few years, he was not only repairing, but also adapting and inventing new equipment of his own, converting waffle irons, humidifiers, mixers, and cutters into appliances specifically for baking communion hosts. Early requests for repairs of antiquated equipment soon turned to orders for new automated equipment that helped convents streamline production.

Seeing increased demand for altar bread throughout the 1950s and the inability of many convents to keep up with that demand,⁵¹ Cavanagh sought ecclesiastical permission to sell altar bread of his own. His bishop enthusiastically supported the request, delighted that “private business would be willing to take over this time-consuming task.”⁵² First selling bread to convents, Cavanagh Company was soon selling to church supply shops and parishes across the country. While many convents continued to make bread in the middle of the twentieth century, on the eve of Vatican II, altar bread was well on its way to becoming the primary domain of private industry. Even as the Catholic Church cultivated a eucharistic identity to better resist the modern world, the material at the heart of that identity had quietly become enmeshed in that world. Indeed, the bread on which the Body of Christ depended was now a product of it.

The Need for New Bread

Efforts to increase the regular reception of communion among Roman Catholic laity over the first half of the twentieth century were most fully realized in the years following the Second Vatican Council. The Council's liturgical constitution, Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963), emphasized the fully conscious and active participation of the liturgical assembly as the “aim to be considered before all else” in the celebration of the Eucharist. And that full participation included especially the reception of communion: “That more perfect form of participation in the Mass whereby the faithful . . . receive the Lord's body . . . is strongly commended.”⁵³ In the decades that followed the promulgation of the liturgical constitution, the Vatican consistently underscored the importance of frequent reception through a range of decrees to support the practice.⁵⁴ Frequent communion became one of the most successful and lasting reforms of the Council in the United States.⁵⁵

Yet, while the dramatic increase in reception of communion after Vatican II continued to fuel demand for altar bread,⁵⁶ it was demand for a new kind of host that would have an even more substantial impact on its fabrication in the United States. The gradual emergence of the host in the Middle Ages as the bread par excellence for the confection of the Eucharist was accompanied by a drive toward an ever whiter, thinner, and smaller host to distinguish between the breads of everyday life and the bread that would become the real presence of Christ.⁵⁷ A short refrain echoed by a bishop in the middle of the fourteenth century condenses the clerical consensus around the ideal medieval wafer: “Christ's host should be white, wheaten, thin, not large, round, unleavened, not mixed.”⁵⁸ Shiny, small, white, paper-thin hosts intended to melt immediately on the tongue that, by Vatican II, had been in use for hundreds of years, embodied that medieval ideal. But the liturgical reforms of Vatican II newly emphasized the importance of robust liturgical signs and symbols. The more intelligible the signs used for the celebration of the Eucharist, exhorted the Holy See, “the more surely and effectively will it penetrate the minds and lives of the faithful.”⁵⁹ Reflecting this conviction, the first edition of the General Instruction of the Roman Missal—the ritual instructions for the celebration of the Mass that emerged out of Vatican II—emphasized that “the nature of the sign demands that the material for the eucharistic celebration appear as actual food.”⁶⁰ Further directives from the Sacred Congregation of Divine Worship underscored the need for “greater authenticity” in regard to the “color, taste, and thickness” of eucharistic bread.⁶¹ If medieval hosts were meant to emphasize the otherness of the bread used for the eucharistic transformation, conciliar liturgists wanted just the opposite: a more breadlike bread that might better emphasize the connection between the bread of the Eucharist and breads of daily life.⁶²

Already well-established as a host maker in its own right by Vatican II, Cavanagh Company was uniquely poised to meet growing demand for new kinds of hosts. Mounting what was likely the first national marketing campaign for altar bread in ecclesiastical history, just two days after the promulgation of Sacrosantcum Concilium, in a letter to its customers Cavanagh announced that it was ready and eager to respond to the Council's call for a new bread:

You have undoubtedly noticed a new interest in the use of whole wheat altar breads. We believe that the growing interest in the liturgy has naturally brought into focus questions of the appropriateness of the altar bread in general use today.

Some question the propriety of a “bread” that is thin, unnaturally shiny and white—the inevitable result of a weakening over-refinement of most of today's bread flours, combined with false standards of perfection not associable with either the nature of bread or its baking process. Many agree that a strengthening of the sign is desirable.

Whole wheat altar bread is one approach toward an increase and more substantial matter. It is in effect the complete use of nature's product. Some consider this reactionary or extreme. Another approach that is not without traditional roots is the production of a thicker and larger size bread from a more substantial bread flour, a dull, less white bread—in fact, a more breadlike bread.⁶³

In the very same month in which the liturgical reforms promulgated the year prior were scheduled to take effect, Cavanagh Company placed its first advertisement in The American Ecclesiastical Review, echoing the language of liturgical reform:

For those who want a STRONGER SIGN we offer WHOLE WHEAT ALTAR BREADS or WHITE BREADS, thicker, larger with mat finish, made from a strong unbleached bread flour.⁶⁴

Marketing their breads with “ecclesiastical approval,” even prior to Vatican II, Cavanagh Company enthusiastically embraced the new signs of the times with the promise of “thicker, denser, more bread-like bread.”⁶⁵

Convents, however, were slower to respond, occasionally provoking demands from longtime customers for the same kinds of bread as those that Cavanagh was by then regularly marketing. In a 1965 letter to the Carmelite Sisters of Indianapolis, for example, a pastor pressured the sisters to make different hosts not only for him, but for all their customers:

We have tried the larger hosts for the people and they are far superior to the smaller ones. They are more suitable because they do get away from the fish-food-wafer character of the smaller host. They are much easier for the priest to handle. With no forewarning the people opened their mouths wide enough to receive the larger hosts. Now why don't you just get a larger cutter and supply us with these larger hosts? I am confident that if you would change to this larger size and even charge more for the hosts, both whole wheat and plain, the priests would be very [grateful] to you. It would not be necessary to ask them: they would be pleasantly surprised and commend you for your aliveness in the new spirit of the Church today.  . . . We are going to change to the larger host. I do hope you will be able to supply them.⁶⁶

In a document about bread making in their community from the following year, the Carmelites dedicated an entire section to the postconciliar demand for whole wheat altar breads. While the sisters acknowledged a “trend toward thicker and [larger] hosts for the peoples’ communion as well as for whole wheat hosts,” they nevertheless indicated that they were not convinced that the trend had caught on. But even more, they said, such hosts were more difficult and more expensive to produce.⁶⁷

Indeed, not everyone was enthusiastic about the “new-fangled” altar bread.⁶⁸ In a letter to the editor of a clerical journal about changes to the Mass, a lay Catholic expressed frustration about the emerging use of breads made from whole wheat flour. “I don't think old associations should be uprooted,” wrote the questioner. “Communion tastes like graham crackers. It used to taste like God.”⁶⁹ In a similar inquiry to another journal, a priest noted that he had been increasingly encountering “brown-colored” hosts that seemed to him “very different” from the ones to which he was accustomed. “[T]hey are rather heavy and coarse, but the flavor is nice,” he wrote. “I'm wondering if this kind is entirely acceptable. The thinner white kind are much more customary.”⁷⁰ In response to the priest's concern, the editor affirmed the validity of hosts made of whole wheat flour, noting both that they were growing in popularity and that they were more theologically appropriate than the “thin and ethereal white ones that just melt away in the mouth.”⁷¹ At first, he said, he did not care for the new bread; but ultimately he came to like the “solid, manly make-up of the heavier breads.” Reporting on his own anecdotal experiences as a chaplain, the editor noted that the young men he served “overwhelmingly prefer whole wheat” wafers.⁷²

A decade later, the slowness with which women religious were responding to such preferences became a source of growing frustration for reform-minded liturgists. A 1974 report from the Liturgical Commission of the Diocese of Providence, Rhode Island, lamented the fact that they believed the vast majority of U.S. parishes were still using “stark white, paper thin, often shiny and plasticlike” hosts.⁷³ Some of the blame for the continued use of the customary hosts, they argued, was the passivity of pastors who were too reluctant to make a change.⁷⁴ But they saved their harshest criticism for women religious. The reason most pastors accepted the conventional form, they argued, was “because that is what is being made or bought for them by the sisters,” who “exercise a general control of standards and quality.”⁷⁵ The problem, they claimed, is that the sisters were too reluctant to change:

Most of the sisters distributing breads feel obliged to maintain the pre-Vatican II pattern of “perfect” or “flawless” bread, a situation which does not help in promoting a more foodlike form. . . . Many associate a more foodlike texture and color with “imperfection.” From habit they prefer the pure white, smooth, shiny form that will suggest the “bread of angels,” which some continue to think should be swallowed without chewing.⁷⁶

The solution, they concluded, was for diocesan liturgical commissions to offer specific instruction encouraging those who make breads to develop a more foodlike form: if a “haphazard and unregulated renewal is to be avoided,” it is only through “their strong efforts that any implementation can be effected”⁷⁷ Most sisters, they asserted, “prefer to await instruction to change rather than initiate a change themselves.”⁷⁸

While women religious struggled to keep up with both increased demand and intensifying pressure for new hosts, Cavanagh Company continued to innovate, automate, and advertise in ways that dramatically increased its share in a rapidly changing market. They created a custom wafer oven, a special mechanical stapler and roofing hammer, a unique dampening technique, and a proprietary blend of flour—all of which allowed them to make a thicker unleavened wafer with a sealed edge that prevented crumbling. The growing amount of wheat needed to produce such bread began to be sourced from one of the largest agribusiness corporations in the world: Archer-Daniel-Midlands Company, the same company that made mass-produced cookies, ramen noodles, tortillas, donuts, and bagels with the same wheat.⁷⁹ Cavanagh soon needed to expand, building a new, highly automated plant resembling a cookie factory that enabled them to double production in response to increasing demand.

The ecclesiastical approval for reception of communion in the hand in the United States in 1977 only further increased demand for the larger, whole wheat breads Cavanagh had been making and marketing for over a decade.⁸⁰ “When the option of Communion in the hand is allowed,” said Cavanagh just before the change, “many of our accounts have instructed us to change their order to whole wheat bread for the very sound reason that since people will now hold the host, it should have the appearance of simple, human food.”⁸¹ With a paradoxical brand promise of bread “untouched by human hands,” and resources that far exceeded the reach of small religious communities, Cavanagh Company developed a reputation for delivering a consistent product in a timely manner that reliably conformed to ecclesiastical standards. A decade after the close of the Council, the company was the largest baker of altar breads in the world, selling over four hundred million pieces of bread a year. Vatican II, said the CEO of the company, “really changed everything” for them.⁸²

As business for Cavanagh Company boomed, bread making in religious communities began to decline. Even before Vatican II, many religious communities were struggling to keep up with increased demand in a time when vocations to their communities were slowing.⁸³ As bread making diminished in convents, Cavanagh made its bread available for them to sell to parishes, allowing such communities to serve as a kind of “clearinghouse for altar breads.”⁸⁴ A range of correspondences from the Indianapolis Carmelites reveals a near-constant consideration of whether or not to stop producing altar bread and simply distribute Cavanagh bread.⁸⁵ For some communities, distributing Cavanagh bread supplemented their own bread making; for others, it replaced it. According to one report, there were as many as five hundred religious communities making altar bread in the 1950s.⁸⁶ By the late 1970s, that number had dwindled to fewer than forty.⁸⁷ While the rise of Cavanagh Company was not the sole cause of the decimation of convent bread baking after Vatican II, the story of the Poor Clare Sisters of the diocese of Corpus Christi with which this article began testifies to the way in which Cavanagh's ascendance made competition from most small communities who did try to stay in business virtually impossible. Indeed, as the president of Cavanagh Company once remarked about the company's unique process of bread making, “We patented the process and kept out competitors to maintain a lion's share of the business.”⁸⁸

The few religious communities that were still making their own altar bread in the decades after Vatican II were forced to do something they had never done before: compete for customers on an open market. By the end of the twentieth century, the largest religious supplier of altar bread was the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in Clyde, Missouri.⁸⁹ Like Cavanagh, the Benedictines launched a toll-free number and a thoughtfully designed website, and began to offer an increasing variety of hosts from which to choose. They rejected the Cavanagh brand promise of bread untouched by human hands: “That gets my dander up,” said one sister of the Cavanagh slogan.⁹⁰ For the Benedictines, it is precisely the touch of their hands and their prayers that sets their bread apart from the Cavanagh bread: “For us, it's the privileged work of our hands and a labor of love. . . . We welcome the opportunity to supply new customers with breads that are always accompanied by our prayers.”⁹¹

The Benedictines in Clyde have also been highly innovative in ways that helped serve emerging pastoral needs while also increasing their own market share. For several years, the Benedictines received requests from Catholics suffering from celiac disease for a gluten-free host. Because Canon Law states that the eucharistic bread must be wheaten, celiac sufferers were in effect prohibited from receiving the eucharistic host.⁹² After experimenting with hundreds of batches of bread over the course of a decade, two sisters—one with a degree in biomedical science—created an altar bread made of water and wheat starch that became the first and, at the time of its creation, the only low-gluten altar bread approved for use in the United States.⁹³ The invention of celiac-friendly wafers boosted their business and forced Cavanagh to compete on their terms.⁹⁴ For several decades, the Benedictines at Clyde remained Cavanagh's largest competitor. But in the wake of the dramatic decrease in celebrations of the Eucharist during the COVID-19 pandemic, after 110 years of host making, the sisters have stopped the vast majority of their host production, now making only small quantities of their signature low-gluten host.

Over the years, marketing materials from Cavanagh Company have shown a keen ability to absorb ecclesiastical anxieties and respond to competitors. In response to longstanding fears about the adulteration of altar bread, Cavanagh assures customers that their hosts are “baked of only whole wheat flour and water, and are made strictly without additives.”⁹⁵ Addressing concerns about the freshness of the bulk purchase of eucharistic bread, Cavanaugh began offering bread “now packed in VACUUM SEALED CANS” to ensure “absolute freshness even after many months in any climate.”⁹⁶ In light of the desires of liturgical reformers for more intelligible sacramental signs, Cavanagh guarantees that their breads are “superior in substance and sign value.”⁹⁷ Concerning worries that thicker altar bread might crumble and therefore jeopardize the sacredness of the consecrated host, Cavanagh promises that the “carefully molded and sealed” edges of its hosts will “prevent crumbs” and that the packaging will prevent damage because it too has “superior strength.”⁹⁸ Addressing the emergence of competition from Eastern Europe, Cavanagh warns its customers about potential imitations: “TO FEEL SECURE we suggest you determine the origin of your altar breads.”⁹⁹ And in an implicit response to the Benedictine sisters’ critique of Cavanagh's promise of bread “untouched by human hands,” Cavanagh insists that “To Produce The Finest Altar Bread and Best Package, Technology, And Automation Are Important . . . BUT HUMAN HANDS REMAIN ESSENTIAL.”¹⁰⁰ Indeed, nearly every debate about the communion host in the United States in the twentieth century can be read in Cavanagh Company's advertisements.

Cavanagh Company now holds an 80 percent share of the market in altar bread in the United States, selling breads of countless sizes and designs to suit virtually any denominational piety, liturgical preference, or theological conviction about the Eucharist. With a similar market share in Canada, England, and Australia, the company was once dubbed the “Microsoft of altar bread” and its owners considered to be in possession of a rare “recession proof business.”¹⁰¹ Whether or not Cavanagh's profits are completely immune to wider market forces, swings in its profits are determined by a decidedly ecclesial economy. After September 11, 2001, as people returned to churches in large numbers, host sales spiked 10 percent. In the wake of the first widespread revelations of the cover-up of sexual abuse of minors in the Catholic Church, sales dropped by an equal amount.¹⁰² When Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Mass at Yankee Stadium in 2008, he offered sixty thousand Cavanagh wafers.¹⁰³ Within just a few decades of its foundation, Cavanagh Company became the largest supplier of communion hosts in history, with wafer sales in the hundreds of millions each year. Even the Benedictines in Clyde now distribute Cavanagh bread.

Conclusion

The relationship between the church and the modern world is one of the most enduring tensions in modern Catholicism in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. “It is not an overstatement,” writes Massimo Faggioli, “to affirm that this issue was the origin of a major rift in the interpretations of the council.”¹⁰⁴ In the first half of the twentieth century, papal writings consistently condemned the modern world in hostile terms, insisting that the “immutable doctrines” of the church could not be “reconciled with modern progress.”¹⁰⁵ In stark contrast, Vatican II articulated an openness in rhetoric, style, and tone that affirmed the ways in which the church learns and even profits from the world.¹⁰⁶ “The Second Vatican Council,” writes Joseph Komonchak, “can be read as the event in which the Catholic Church significantly reassessed modern society and culture and the attitudes and strategies it had adopted toward them in the previous century and a half.”¹⁰⁷ For some interpreters of Vatican II, the more positive attitude toward modernity found in its documents demonstrated an excessive and naive optimism that has resulted in a church that is overly accommodating to the world. For others, that openness has been a necessary affirmation of the living relationship between the church and the world.¹⁰⁸ Both those who reject that openness and those who affirm it have each in their own way sought to transform the brokenness of that world.¹⁰⁹ And as the central source of Catholic identity, the Eucharist—both before and after Vatican II—has been a privileged practice in which Catholics seek to embody alternatives to the world as it is.

But however the church has articulated its relationship to the modern world theoretically or theologically, a lived history of the host shows the subtle yet persistent ways in which the church has been bound to that world. Before Vatican II, efforts to increase lay reception of communion as a strategy to mobilize Catholics against modernity had the effect of dramatically increasing demand for the material on which it depended—hosts—in a way that gradually decimated their production in small convents and strengthened the church's reliance on a modern market. After the Council, intensifying demand coupled with emerging theological convictions about the need for a new kind of bread that might better enable the Eucharist to penetrate the lives of the faithful contributed to the ultimate dominance of that market. In other words, both when twentieth-century Catholicism wanted to barricade itself against the world and when it wanted to lift those barricades, the material on which the practice at the heart of Roman Catholicism depended was subject to the pervasive logics, strategies, and processes of the modern market. Indeed, while contemporary reflection on the relationship between U.S. Christianity and the market has tended to focus on its more exceptional expressions in American Protestantism—from the creation and commercialization of Christian holiday celebrations to the rise of a lucrative evangelical book trade¹¹⁰—the contemporary history of the host reveals the ways in which Catholic eucharistic practices in both their “conservative” and their “progressive” manifestations are inevitably enmeshed in the material of the world in ways that outrun even the fiercest theological objections to it. Even more, the history of the host in the modern world suggests the ways in which tending not only to the texts but also to the materials of modern Catholicism might yield more complicated interpretations of the legacy and meanings of the Second Vatican Council.