Abstract

Digital culture often treats openness as an obvious good: source code, data, publications, and platforms promise access, transparency, and collaboration. Yet access is not communion, visibility is not truth, and circulation is not yet gift. Catholic Eucharistic theology offers a deeper grammar for judging openness because the Eucharist is the paradigmatic non-rivalrous gift: Christ gives himself and is received wholly without depletion of the giver. This does not make the Eucharist like software, nor does software explain sacrament. Rather, open source becomes intelligible and criticizable under the Eucharistic form of gift. Code can be copied, inspected, modified, and redistributed without consuming the original, but open-source communities depend on finite labor, governance, trust, infrastructure, and institutional support. Read through Eucharistic presence, anamnesis, koinonia, and ecclesial mediation, digital openness appears as a created and morally mixed practice judged and illuminated by the sacramental gift of Christ.