Dave Kimbell is the CFO for the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee. In this month's Think Piece, he reflects on lessons gleaned from a recent trip to Rome with the 2025-27 Eucharistic Culture Project cohort, a two-year formation program jointly sponsored by the McGrath Institute for Church Life's Center for Liturgy and the Church Properties Initiative.
From May 23–29, 2026, I participated in the University of Notre Dame’s Eucharistic Culture Project Rome cohort, a fellowship experience focused on sacred spaces, ecclesial property, land management, church maintenance, financial stewardship, and the broader question of how the Church’s physical places can serve evangelization and renewal.
The Eucharistic Culture Project seeks to study how Catholic life is formed through worship, space, culture, memory, and institutional practice. In Rome, our cohort of 22 diverse professionals from around the country focused especially on ecclesial property and the ways sacred spaces have been acquired, built, renovated, repurposed, maintained, governed, and funded over time. The purpose was not simply to tour historic churches or meet with Vatican officials, but to consider how the Church’s long experience with property, architecture, pilgrimage, finance, and public life might illuminate present-day pastoral questions.
The central insight I had from the Rome experience is that Eucharistic culture is not simply a community ethos that is taught, celebrated, or preached; it is also built, funded, governed, maintained, and made visible through physical places.
Rome reveals this in a uniquely concentrated way. Churches, cemeteries, public squares, pilgrimage roads, gardens, schools, hospitals, monasteries, Vatican offices, and charitable institutions all exist in a layered relationship with one another as well as within and around the secular buildings of modern-day Italy and the historic structures of ancient Rome. In many cases, the Church’s physical places have shaped Catholic life for centuries not only because of their beauty, but because they integrate worship, memory, public encounter, service, governance, and financial imagination.
Central Insight: Place Forms Eucharistic Culture
Rome is the archetype of a city where the Church intersects with nearly every aspect of life. It is a center of ecclesial authority, a place of pilgrimage, a city of martyrs, a site of ancient pagan worship, a repository of Christian memory, and a living urban environment where churches, civic spaces, homes, businesses, schools, religious communities, and charitable institutions are layered together.
One of my strongest impressions during the trip was that sacred places are not neutral. They form people. They teach. They preserve memory. They invite devotion. They shape public life. They also require governance, maintenance, capital, and leadership. It is also important to note that sacred places are often not serving the same mission or even looking the same after the ebbs and flows of centuries. There are only two exceptions to this I can think of… in the Trastevere neighborhood, there was an apartment complex serving as a sort of homeless shelter in a building that was more than 1,000 years old. Apparently, this building was built by the local church community to be a homeless shelter in the 9th century, and it has essentially remained unchanged for 1,000 years. The other example is the camposanto… which I’ll address later.
Other than those two examples, all the parishes and sacred spaces that we encountered have grown, changed, and adapted over time to serve different demographics, different religious orders, and different purposes—even in the same Christian context. At the Angelicum, a tower apartment built for a wealthy sister when the building was a Dominican convent was now serving as a swanky meeting room for hosting donor receptions at the university that now occupies the building. With a living theology of place, the practical decisions of leaders in one century can bear unexpected fruit centuries later.
St. Peter’s Basilica provides perhaps the most powerful example. It stands over a place of martyrdom and public spectacle, a place where the early Church’s witness was sealed in blood in the 40,000-seat circus of Nero. The physical location itself becomes part of the theology of the place. What was once a site associated with imperial entertainment and persecution became one of the great Eucharistic centers of the universal Church. 40,000 pilgrims can now celebrate Mass together inside St. Peter’s Basilica—witnessing the ultimate drama of the incarnation and paschal mystery. By transforming over many years and various renovations, the Church property does not erase its history—rather, it transfigures it into a visible revelation of the Church’s mission.
This pattern appears throughout Rome. Temples, civic buildings, cemeteries, public squares, hospitals, monastic sites, pilgrimage routes, and family properties were gradually drawn into the Church’s life. They became places where memory, worship, service, beauty, and authority could be encountered physically.
For our diocese, this suggests a fruitful way to think about property: not simply as land, buildings, insurance schedules, maintenance obligations, or balance sheet items, but as places of formation embedded in communities—whether intentional or not.
Four Practical Lessons from Rome
Lesson 1: Sacred places become most powerful when they are integrated with daily life and are accessible.
Several of the most compelling places in Rome were not isolated monuments. They were sacred spaces integrated with ordinary patterns of life.
On the Aventine Hill, Santa Sabina and San Anselmo sit within a neighborhood that includes public gardens, scenic overlooks, monastic prayer, tourist movement, weddings, bookshops, and daily neighborhood life. The churches are beautiful and historic, but they are also accessible. They invite people into prayer, reflection, beauty, and encounter.
Trastevere offered another example. The neighborhood’s churches, public fountains, small streets, piazzas, restaurants, schools, civic buildings, and ministries seemed to reinforce one another. The churches were not merely destinations; they helped organize the neighborhood. Regular aspects of public life, economic activity, pilgrimage, and worship existed in close relationships. With Vatican dicasteries, some “ministry of culture” industry such as the Italian school for art restorationists, elementary school (built next to St. Cecilia’s basilica and former residences), a police headquarters, and numerous tourist sites, there seemed to be enough industry to sustain the economic life of the community without too much creative funding.
The visit to San Francesco a Ripa in Trastevere also made this concrete. The church preserves memory connected to St. Francis of Assisi and Blessed Ludovica Albertoni, while the friars who serve the site today are involved in housing and vocational support for migrants. The place holds together history, beauty, devotion, and service.
La Trattoria de Gli Amici, a restaurant in Trastevere started by the Sant’Egidio community and staffed by people with special needs, offered another practical expression of this principle. It was not only a charitable idea; it appeared to be a functioning restaurant with a simplified menu, clear mission, good food, and a beautiful model of vocational development. The owner/manager spent some time with us describing the journey, the decisions they made as they grew, and what they had to do in order to be a profitable endeavor that could sustain mission operations for the long-term.
A diocese could benefit from thinking about parish, school, retreat, and ministry properties as places of public Catholic encounter. A campus might be more than a building used at scheduled times. It could include community gardens, shrines, outdoor prayer spaces, parish commons, hospitality areas, visible works of mercy, and spaces that invite neighbors into contact with the Church.
This may be especially relevant for future parish sites, school campuses, and properties located near growing residential areas. The design of a campus could help communicate that the Church is not withdrawn from the community, but present within it as a place of worship, service, beauty, and belonging.
Lesson 2: Mission property requires strong governance and financial clarity.
Rome also made clear that sacred places endure when mission, ownership, governance, funding, and maintenance are aligned. When those elements are unclear, a place can remain beautiful but become difficult to sustain or pastorally ambiguous.
The Campo Santo Teutonico offered a powerful example. It is a cemetery within the Vatican walls, rooted in early Christian memory and associated for centuries with German Catholic stewardship. Its endurance depended not only on devotion, but on legal identity, ecclesial recognition, governance, and continuity of responsibility. The German Church’s historical role, the archconfraternity structure, and the property’s unique status all contributed to its preservation.
Borgo Laudato Si' and Castel Gandolfo raised related questions. These properties involve tourism, Vatican support, ecological programming, vocational training, migrant services, conference uses, historic ruins, gardens, and ongoing maintenance of a significant campus. The mission is rich, but also complex.
Castel Gandolfo was a great example of how a town developed along a pilgrimage road, and through gifts and other means of acquisition, the Church was able to have a grand palace and place for welcoming diplomats, donors, and pilgrims. Because it felt “removed” from civilization and in a stunningly beautiful setting, the Church’s mission in this location was less about service and more about integration with the natural surroundings to provide a serene place of prayer and retreat. The property at Borgo Laudato Si was adjacent to the overall Castel Gandolfo village, so they must be viewed together. Despite the beautiful and spiritually uplifting setting and grounds, the integration between inward-facing retreat and outward-facing service seemed still to be developing.
The experience invited reflection on how easily a large Church property can carry multiple purposes that require careful integration. Developing a formalized tool could help leadership distinguish between properties that are merely owned and properties that are intentionally stewarded.
Lesson 3: Cemeteries and memorial spaces are underdeveloped Eucharistic places.
One of my most significant reflections from the trip came from the Campo Santo Teutonico, an ancient cemetery located next to St. Peter’s Basilica at the site of the apostle’s execution. The cemetery invited a deeper consideration of Christian burial, institutional and cultural memory, physical place, and hope in the resurrection.
In ancient Rome, roads into the city were often lined with memorials of military glory, civic identity, and imperial power. Memorials to the dead were politically and culturally charged— reminders of power to enforce structures of oppression. However, in a Christian context, the cemetery became not merely a marker of the past, but a witness to the resurrection of the body and the communion of saints. It connected the living and the dead in a physical place of prayer. Memory becomes intertwined with service and worship, reminders of our ultimate destination and the reality that political powers have no power over Christ—who has conquered death itself. Cemeteries become holy ground where generations of people will find hope and inspiration, which translates into stewardship and stability.
This has important implications for Eucharistic culture. The Eucharist is never disconnected from the body, memory, sacrifice, hope, or communion. A cemetery or memorial garden can make those realities visible. It can help a parish remember its founders, deceased pastors, religious, parishioners, families, and local witnesses. It can also form future generations by grounding them in a place where Christian hope is made tangible.
Other dioceses, my own included, could benefit from exploring cemeteries, columbaria, memorial gardens, clergy memorials, parish founder memorials, and memento mori spaces as part of sacred-space planning. These spaces might not be peripheral to parish life. They might become deeply formative places of prayer, memory, and Catholic identity. This does not need to become an immediate construction initiative. It could begin as a theological and pastoral conversation: how might our physical campuses better witness to the resurrection of the body, the communion of saints, and the continuity of Catholic memory?
Lesson 4: Renewal usually requires strong leadership and a catalytic moment.
Rome’s major sacred spaces did not generally emerge from routine maintenance alone. Many were renewed in moments of crisis, decay, pilgrimage, political change, evangelizing urgency, or bold ecclesial leadership.
Put another way, it seems as though these were the elements necessary for planning and development of sacred spaces at scale in Rome:
- Leadership with vision and authority
- Compelling reasons whether pastoral, symboling, political, or a combination
- Extraordinary funding beyond ordinary giving
- Timing that makes inaction untenable
- A narrative capable of drawing people into participation
Rome’s churches were often restored or expanded in response to visible decay, new pilgrimage patterns, political shifts, or a desire to reassert Catholic identity. Leaders such as popes, saints, religious founders, and patrons responded to historical circumstances with buildings, restorations, roads, piazzas, institutions, and financing models that shaped Catholic life for centuries.
The visit to the rooms of St. Ignatius at the Gesù provided one of the more practical insights. Ignatius’ placement of Jesuit churches and houses reflected a deliberate strategy. He sought proximity to centers of influence while orienting ministry toward the poor. That spatial strategy joined evangelization, influence, education, and service.
The main Trastevere basilica (Santa Maria) was an early Church site of worship, symbolism, and was built next to what was, essentially, a veterans hospital for the Roman Empire. The early Christians were allowed to worship in exchange for running the hospital as a ministry, even though it was a government-owned building and served mostly Roman soldiers. One can imagine how offering this care created relationships of mutual benefit between the Christians and the soldiers. In some ways, the agreement between this community and the Roman empire to run the hospital was of course motivated by the Gospel, but it was also a practical decision which allowed the community to develop in a particular place.
After an extended period of decay during which Rome was essentially abandoned, Pope Sixtus V in the late 16th century utilized public-private partnerships to intentionally reshape Rome through new and improved streets, long visual axes, and re-erected obelisks that helped connect the city’s major basilicas and guide pilgrims through sacred space. His pontificate helped reshape Rome through new and improved processional and pilgrimage routes and repaired aqueducts for public drinking water. Even the sampietrini paving tradition developed in that same broad period and was adopted for centuries as the primary way of paving roads in and around Rome. His work offers a useful example of how infrastructure, beauty, wayfinding, and pilgrimage can be integrated into a broader ecclesial vision.
Concluding Reflection
The Rome experience clarified that Catholic property is never merely functional. It carries memory, theology, beauty, public witness, governance, cost, risk, and possibility. Sacred spaces can become places where the Church’s deepest beliefs are made visible: the Incarnation, the Eucharist, the communion of saints, the resurrection of the body, the dignity of the poor, the importance of beauty, and the call to gather the people of God. Of course we are sacramental people, and thus the physical environment will always be part of our faith life.
For the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee, this reflection comes at a meaningful time. Our diocese is growing. We are considering new properties, new structures, new ministries, and new financial tools. We are also inheriting older properties that need care, clarity, and sometimes renewed purpose. It invites us to ask how our own places—parishes, schools, retreat centers, cemeteries, Catholic Charities properties, future parish sites, and underutilized land—might become more visibly Eucharistic: places of worship, encounter, memory, service, beauty, and sustainable mission.
I invite other dioceses around the United States to consider this reflection, as well. In the Church in America, there is an opportunity before us to develop ways of seeing property not only as something that we own or maintain, but rather as gifts that we steward for the formation of Catholic life across generations.
