Leadership Cohort
The Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate's Church Properties Initiative and the McGrath Inistute for Church Life's Notre Dame Center for Liturgy have partnered up to lead the 2025-2027 cohort of the Eucharist Culture Project. An initiative of the Mathis Liturgical Leadership Program, the Eucharistic Culture Project seeks to form leaders committed to fostering a Eucharistic culture in parishes, schools, and neighborhoods.
The focus of the 2025–2027 cohort is the pastoral issue of church property. Diocesan real estate directors, lay professionals interested in contributing to the mission of the Church, lay ecclesial ministers responsible for pastoral planning, and priests and religious were invited to apply to think through this rich and complex issue together with the University of Notre Dame. The application window closed in December 2024.
The 24 members of the 2025-2027 Eucharistic Culture Project cohort participated in a week-long orientation program at the University of Notre Dame in July 2025. Over the next two years, the cohort participants will:
- Spend four semesters in an online learning community with other leaders throughout the United States, participating in an interdisciplinary curriculum designed to help the Church to think more deeply about the theological, liturgical, historical, and economic dimensions of church property.
- Spend a week in Rome in May 2026, contemplating the relationship between property and worship in the history of the Church with most expenses paid for by the University of Notre Dame.
- Travel in the winter of 2027 to an American archdiocese that is thinking creatively about the theological, liturgical, and economic dimensions of church property as a means of evangelization.
- Develop a project related to church property that provides future best practices, case studies, and principles for other (arch)dioceses and religious orders in the United States and throughout the globe. This project will be presented in person at Notre Dame during the summer of 2027.
This cohort is being co-directed by Timothy O’Malley, Academic Director of the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy, Madeline Johnson, Program Director of the Church Properties Initiative, and Carolyn Pirtle, Program Director of the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy.