T he Eucharist is many things, not least of which is a profound reflection on and practice of the relationship of humans and God to the material world. Catholics in recent decades have not been particularly good at spelling out those connections. There tends to be a divide in parishes between the devotees of Eucharistic adoration on the one hand, and the social justice committee on the other. For a certain kind of Catholic, the point of the Eucharist is transcendence of the material world, an evacuation of the substance, the breadness of bread and the wineness of wine, and its replacement with Christ.
For another kind of Catholic, this sounds like escapism; Eucharistic piety, if it is to be relevant, must be translated into a symbol for more pressing ethical concerns. The first type of Catholic suspects the second of secularizing the Eucharist, reducing it to mere worldly concerns.
The second type of Catholic suspects the first of collusion with injustice, fiddling while the world burns. What I hope to do in what follows is to present a view of the Eucharist that is simultaneously transcendent and deeply implicated in the material world, that both worships the real presence of Christ in the elements and is directly relevant to the day-to-day realities of our economic system. I will do so by addressing the fetishism of commodities, that is, the investing of material things with transcendent powers.
Commodity fetishism is a critique of the deification of material things in our current economic system; it is famously associated with Karl Marx, but I will argue that it is a theme also found, at least implicitly, in Catholic Social Teaching. But the investment of divinity in the material is also precisely what is at stake in the Eucharist.
So I want to explore the possibility that the Eucharist provides a better practice of God in things that can help heal the distortions produced by commodity fetishism. I will begin by exploring the theme of commodity fetishism, both in Marx and in Catholic Social Teaching.
