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Welcoming Applications for a New Church Property Leadership Cohort

Madeline Johnson

The Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate’s Church Properties Initiative and the McGrath Institute for Church Life’s Notre Dame Center for Liturgy invite applicants for the 2025–2027 cohort of the Eucharistic Culture Project, an initiative of the Mathis Liturgical Leadership Program, which forms 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 are invited to apply to think through this rich and complex issue together with the University of Notre Dame.

Over two years, members of the 2025–2027 Eucharistic Culture Project will:

  • Participate in a week-long orientation program at the University of Notre Dame during the summer of 2025.
  • Spend two years 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.
  • 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.
  • Spend a week in Rome, contemplating the relationship between property and worship in the history of the Church, most expenses paid for by the University of Notre Dame.
  • Travel to an American (arch)diocese that is thinking creatively about the theological, liturgical, and economic dimensions of church property as a means of evangelization.

This cohort will be co-directed by Timothy O’Malley, Academic Director of the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy, Madeline Johnson, Program Manager of the Church Properties Initiative, and Carolyn Pirtle, Program Director of the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy. If you have any questions, please contact Carolyn Pirtle at cpirtle@nd.edu.

Read the full call for applications and apply here by December 2, 2024.