Nine students in Notre Dame's real estate minor traveled to Oak Park, IL, on November 1 to visit two merged parishes that are considering how the property under their care can best serve their ongoing mission. The Church Properties Workshop is a 2-credit research seminar with a rotating focus, taught by CPI Program Director Madeline Johnson. In fall 2023, the course focused on the canonical, architectural, cultural, and financial dimensions of the adaptive reuse of formerly sacred space. This fall's focus is the real estate implications of diocesan restructuring exercises (pastoral planning processes frequently resulting in parish mergers and church closures) taking place across the country.

St. Catherine of Siena - St. Lucy and St. Giles Parish, spread across two campuses, became one as a result of the Archdiocese of Chicago's Renew My Church pastoral planning effort, as did nearby Ascension - St. Edmund's. Together, the four sites, served by one pastor, Fr. Carl Morello, minister to the inner Chicago suburb of Oak Park, a community of 50,000 with a rich history of prioritizing unity in the face of urban change. In 1968, the Village of Oak Park passed a Fair Housing Ordinance, which prohibited the discriminatory lending and home sale practices that were then entrenching racial divisions in cities around the country. Today, the Catholic community of Oak Park, including its three schools, serves a diverse Catholic and non-Catholic population in a neighborhood with a range of local businesses and housing options.

After attending All Saints' Day Mass with the St. Catherine - St. Lucy school body, Notre Dame students studying architecture, finance, marketing, and economics heard from pastor Fr. Carl Morello, charged with guiding the Catholic community of Oak Park through the transitions that have followed Renew My Church, about the school's vibrant ministry. Tim Brangle '89, an architect and urban designer and parishioner at St. Giles, and Chris Dillion, a local developer who has worked on adaptive reuse projects on historic church properties, pointed out the architectural richness of the mostly-vacant St. Edmund's school building. In a discussion following the visits, students annotated site plans to record their observations of the missional and economic assets the parishes currently have, as well as portions of the properties presenting particular challenges, such as large deferred maintenance bills.

Drawing on church documents like Apostolicam Actuositatem, the Second Vatican Council's decree on the apostolate of the laity, and "Guidelines for Decommissing and Ecclesial Reuse of the Churches," produced in 2018 by the Pontifical Council for Culture, as well as their real estate training, students will explore masterplan concepts for the four sites that leverage spiritual and temporal resources to support the parishes' local Eucharistic presence and the neighborhood's vitality, before continuing their research into six other American dioceses for the rest of the semester.

The research conducted during this fall's Church Properties Workshop contributes to CPI's ongoing work on Diocesan Restructuring Exercises, one of the Initiative's current research focus areas.