-
May 6, 2026There is a peculiar verb that economists use when one company absorbs another, consuming its assets, folding its workers into a larger body, erasing its name: cannibalization. They do not mean it literally, of course. But the word surfaces from somewhere—from an older, darker grammar of human behavior that knows something economists are too polite to say plainly. We devour each other. And nothing makes this more visible than scarcity.
Watch what happens when prices rise and shelves thin out. Something shifts. The person in line ahead of you becomes a competitor. The neighbor who stockpiles becomes an enemy. The community that once shared common resources begins sorting itself into the haves and the have-nots, the clever and the foolish, the deserving and the undeserving. René Girard called this mimetic crisis—the moment when scarcity inflames our tendency to want what others want, and that wanting curdles into rivalry, rivalry into resentment, resentment into violence. The mechanism is ancient. It is written into the oldest human stories, including the ones we find in Scripture.
But here is what the economic analysis always misses: underneath the cannibalistic reflex, there is a hunger that cannot be satisfied by acquiring more. We do not ultimately want the other person's bread. We want what we imagine bread will give us—security, dignity, belonging, a place at the table. We want communion. The violence of scarcity, at its root, is a distorted desire for something holy.
This is not an abstraction for Catholics. Every Sunday, we enact it. We gather at a table. We hold out our hands empty. We receive a Body broken for us—not taken from us, not extracted in the logic of scarcity, but given freely, pressed into our palms, placed on our tongues. The Eucharist does not pretend that scarcity doesn't exist. It redeems the very gesture of eating by filling it with a different logic: the logic of abundance, of gift, of a love that multiplies rather than divides.
The risen Christ, in the weeks following Easter, keeps doing one thing: he eats with people. He breaks bread. He grills fish. He presides over tables. The resurrection is not announced in an imperial decree or a military triumph. It is whispered around a meal. He is recognized in the breaking of the bread.
When prices rise, and the news cycle fills with stories of shortage and hoarding, our task as a community of faith is not to deny the material reality—the bills are real, the cupboards sometimes genuinely bare. Our task is to resist the logic that shortage imposes: the logic that says there is not enough, that you must take before it is taken, that the stranger's gain is your loss. That logic ends in cannibalism. It always has.
The Eucharist trains us in the counter-logic. We practice, week by week, receiving rather than seizing. We practice recognizing the Body of Christ—in the bread, yes, and also in the hungry person beside us. We do not have to choose between feeding ourselves and belonging to each other. That is the lie scarcity tells.
The deepest hunger is for a table large enough for everyone. The good news is that the table exists. We sit at it every Sunday.
— Fr. Matthew Hawkins