Spiritual Economics of Communion Wafers

Buying the Body of Christ < Killing the Buddha: Just as important for the world of altar breads, Vatican II got Protestants taking Communion again. For Episcopalians, it rekindled the idea of “recapturing what we held in common” with Catholics, as Tom Miller, a Canon of Arts and Liturgy, put it, sitting in an anteroom at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. “In addition to baptism, the Eucharist is the next closest thing, ” he said. Following Vatican II, not only Episcopalians, but Lutherans and other Protestants began to question their longstanding aversion to taking Communion every week, of steering away from parts of the service that could be seen as “too Catholic.” The Sunday service at St. John the Divine, for instance, now includes the Body and the Blood of Christ. Beginning in the 1960s, without cloistered communities to do their baking, thousands of Protestant churches went looking for wafer suppliers.