Innovative Nuns Find Answer to Gluten-Free Wafers

c. 2007 Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly CLYDE, Mo. _ Like other nuns across the nation and around the world, the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration spend most of their day in prayer. “Our main work is prayer,” said Sister Lynn D’Souza. “That is what we see as the mission for the church, for the world […]

c. 2007 Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly

CLYDE, Mo. _ Like other nuns across the nation and around the world, the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration spend most of their day in prayer.

“Our main work is prayer,” said Sister Lynn D’Souza. “That is what we see as the mission for the church, for the world _ to pray for the needs of people of all places, of all times.”


The sisters pray together _ five times a day _ and they pray alone, two-and-a-half hours a day.

But that is not all they do.

These sisters also bake, and they have been baking for nearly 100 years. They are the largest religious producer of Communion wafer, shipping 2 million wafers a week.

“We as Catholics believe in the true presence of Christ in the Communion wafer, in the wine that we use at Eucharist,” says D’Souza. “In the Gospel, Jesus says, `Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood, dwell in me and I dwell in them.’

But starting in the early 1990s, the sisters began to hear from some Catholic parishioners with celiac disease _ a disease which makes gluten undigestable _ who couldn’t receive the sacrament because the wafers contained wheat and gluten.

D’Souza said the Church “requires that breads used at Eucharist contain some wheat … in keeping with the tradition of the church” because that’s what Jesus used at the Last Supper.

“So, the Catholic Church is saying we need a wheat bread to be used. People with celiac disease are saying we need a bread that has no gluten in it. Wheat equals gluten pretty much, so that was the dilemma we were working with.”

The issue has been a controversial one in the church.

In 2004, Bishop John Smith of Trenton, N.J., ruled a young girl’s first Communion invalid because she used a rice-based wafer for the sacrament. In May of 2005, after an hour-long meeting with the girl’s family, Smith also declined to seek a change of the rules with Vatican officials.


A 1995 ruling by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI, barred using non-gluten wafers, but said some substitutes may be valid “provided that they contain the amount of gluten sufficient to obtain the confection of the bread” and there is “no addition of foreign materials.”

Over the years, more and more callers were asking for alternatives.

“I started doing research and talked to technicians, bakers, lawyers, doctors, people who couldn’t tolerate gluten to try to find out everything that I could about it,” said Sister Jane Heschmeyer said.

D’Souza, after receiving a degree in biochemistry, arrived at the monastery in 1999 and joined the baking effort. She approached the bread like a “science project thing,” she said.

“It wasn’t that I had high lofty ambitions of providing … someone’s need,” she added. “I just thought, `Oh, this is a science experiment.”’

Given the church’s insistence that wheat had to be in the wafer, they thought that wheat starch might be a solution since most of the gluten is removed.

“What the scientists were telling us what we were trying to do was impossible,” said Heschmeyer. “If you add wheat starch and water you get glue. If you bake it, it gets very hard, which is what we found out.”


But what the scientists called impossible Heschmeyer saw as a challenge.

“If the Holy Spirit was asking people to ask us to do it, the Holy Spirit had something in mind,” she said. “There was just something in me that just said, `Go with this thing; we could do it,’ although I had no idea that 12 years later I would still be doing it, or trying to do it.”

A supporter from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops took the issue to the Vatican.

“He had been in Rome and just talked to … Ratzinger … and said that (the) cardinal said, `If the sisters in Clyde can produce this (low-gluten) bread, we will fully support it.”’

With that encouragement, and two different kinds of low-gluten wheat starch supplied by the bishops, the nuns gave it one more try.

One recipe yielded something more like a “sticky goo,” Heschmeyer said. The concoction stuck to spoons and fingers. “It was such a mess,” D’Souza said.

The nuns “put a blob of it on the waffle irons we were using and we went to clean up.” They left the dough on the waffle iron and came back a little later and … “Voila!” exclaimed Heschmeyer.


“There was bread,” said D’Souza.

“It was not pretty,” said Heschmeyer. “It was a very interesting looking bread on the plate. But it had withstood the baking process. It was intact. It was not gooey. It didn’t stick to the plate. We picked it up.

The bread had potential.

In hindsight, D’Souza said she sees that the nuns were being used by God.

“You know, we were God’s hands, God’s instrument and when I look back on it, I’m kind of awed,” she said.

It’s peak season for wafer production _ both for the wheat variety and the now thriving low-gluten specialty. Business is booming. The sisters are waiting on a patent.

(This story was originally reported by Betty Rollin for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.)

DEA/CM END ROLLIN

Editors: To obtain photos of the Benedictine nuns making wafers, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

A version of this story first appeared on the PBS program “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.” This article may be reprinted by RNS clients. Please use the Religion & Ethics Newsweekly byline.

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