The University of Notre Dame’s Church Properties Initiative (CPI), a unit of the Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate, conducts research, educates students, and equips leaders to activate land and buildings in service to the Church and the world. As the world’s largest non-state landowner and provider of social services, the Catholic Church stewards a global portfolio of historic, complex, and socially impactful properties. The Church’s footprint has adapted to diverse contexts and dramatic change throughout its two-thousand-year history, from the monasteries of the Middle Ages to the urban parish school, and today is no different, with the church contracting and expanding to reflect demographic shifts and religious trends around the world. Each fall, the CPI hosts a conference on campus that explores the intersection of the built environment and the Catholic faith, attracting hundreds of church leaders, top academic scholars, and industry experts from around the world. Attendees share challenges, best practices, creative ideas, and research on how the Church understands and uses her property.
Two time Super Bowl Champion Harrison Butker and his business partner Austin Wright, who together co-founded MDKeller, were deeply impressed with CPI's research and thought leadership, and wanted to support translating that data into action. Conversations with the CPI team led to an idea: creating a $10,000 cash prize for the most innovative use of church property that could accelerate a good idea while inspiring others around the world to transform property in creative ways to continue to spread the Gospel. “I am excited that MDKeller is partnering with Notre Dame and the Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate, as there are so many opportunities to reimagine how the Church views its real estate and how it can have a positive impact on future generations of Catholics,” Harrison said. “When discussing Church real estate, we are talking about more than just physical buildings. We are talking about our patrimony and it is essential that we work together to ensure that the work of generations of Catholics before us was not done in vain.”
Butker’s business partner at MDKeller, Austin Wright, echoed those sentiments. “It is a wonderful time to be Catholic in America and the Church’s substantial real estate portfolio must play an essential role. The possibilities are endless and now is the time to ensure we stop selling off our patrimony and rethink how we view physical assets.”
The five criteria for the prize are that the project must have a bold vision, be distinctively Catholic, connotatively use property, fulfill the highest and best use of the property, and consider scaling and sustainability. As was recently reported on EWTN, over 115 applicants submitted ideas, in process projects, or completed ventures that creatively used Church property. Submissions came from five continents, 11 countries, and over 80 dioceses, underscoring the huge need and opportunity for the Church to rethink her assets in ways that can bring Christ to more people today.
As the leading Catholic research university in the world, Notre Dame is uniquely positioned to study and explore the undercurrents of Church Property issues through a wide array of lenses such as architecture, engineering, theology, history, finance, sociology, and more. The conference, coupled with the prize, are creating ways for the Church to reimagine her property in light of the Evangelization.