If there is one thing I have learned about Catholic real estate during my first months on the CPI team, it is that we are at a crossroads. There are claims that the Church is the largest non-governmental landowner in the world. Some say that holding this large amount of land is evidence of the Church’s truth and success. Others say that it breeds opportunity for corruption. What is certain is that the Church’s property and wealth are only ever meant to serve mission–and that in many places, the way it does so needs to be reimagined.

But how exactly does this work? Ought the Church to place “for sale” signs in front of every unused convent and empty rural Church? Should dioceses flip all the crumbling, urban parochial schools into apartments and become the “largest non-governmental property manager” in the world? There are even examples of high-ropes courses and climbing gyms in cathedralesque shells of desacralized churches: verso l’alto indeed!

These are the types of questions that CPI engages with on a daily basis. And while, objectively, some ideas are better than others, our job is not (really) to provide normative answers to the proposals above. So what is our place?

In addition to developing academic research and supporting undergraduate education, CPI has always been intended to be an engine to advance church property stewardship in practice. But as an entity that does not provide real estate consulting services, the way we do so has more directly to do with people than with property. This year, particularly through our diocesan networking calls and through a newly launched leadership cohort, I’ve seen the power of community and conversation to begin to transform the culture of church property stewardship.

It may be surprising to a newcomer to learn that large organizations like Catholic dioceses, responsible for overseeing portfolios of hundreds of buildings, do not always have a department specifically tasked with management and direction of these assets–it definitely surprised me. Last January, CPI informally surveyed over 50 diocesan leaders responsible for overseeing real estate, and found that only about one in five of those surveyed served in a real-estate-specific department. Real estate was overseen by a facilities or property management team in 32% of cases; by a finance officer in 25% of cases; and in 8% of dioceses, the real estate professional worked alone, sometimes reporting directly to the bishop.

Is this a problem? Canon law does not dictate in detail how a chancery should be structured to support real estate operations. It emphasizes a bishop’s supervisory role over the assets of ecclesial entities subject to his authority, while recognizing that local leaders like parish pastors have direct responsibility for specific parish properties, and that local conditions and customs leave room for legitimate variation in how this administration happens (Book V of the Code of Canon Law, Canon 1276). Thus, it may be natural for a growing diocese to put real estate under a building and construction department as more churches are built, while an older diocese with a lot of deferred maintenance may primarily see property in terms of facilities maintenance.

Despite the variety in their structure, however, diocesan leaders face many common challenges when it comes to property, and the monthly calls among those responsible for real estate that our team has facilitated this year have surfaced key areas in need of innovation. 

One third of diocesan real estate directors we surveyed answered that a pastoral planning process likely to result in parish mergers and church closures was either in the planning stages, currently ongoing, or completed in the last 5 years, and another 20% answered that they foresaw one coming in the near future. On one of our calls, Tom Du Bois, Director of Building and Real Estate for the Archdiocese of St. Louis, shared his diocese’s experiences reaching the implementation stage of such a process, the point at which real estate questions begin to come to the fore. 

Ninety percent of respondents to our start-of-year survey indicated that they were in search of best practices for addressing deferred maintenance, a persistent challenge that keeps church communities from dreaming proactively for the future. So we asked Brian Black, an experienced tradesman, construction manager, and expert in historical preservation, to lead a call to share a vision for a healthy culture of capital maintenance planning and execution and to equip diocesan leaders with concrete best practices.

With legislation proposed or pending in a number of states that would expand possibilities for affordable housing development on church property, we invited a group member and an outside expert to provide perspectives on this process from the landowner’s point of view. Paul Connery, recently retired from the Archdiocese of Hartford, led the first call, while Timothy Crawl-Bey of Catholic Charities USA brought a national perspective to the second.

Finally, the group of largely North American diocesan real estate directors got a compelling look into Catholic church properties in New Zealand, courtesy of Michael Butler, Head of Asset Management for the Diocese of Auckland. Butler’s presentation offered the group new ideas for church real estate financing and gave directors a look at how “Crown support” (government funding) for religious schools looks in a country very different from the United States.

These monthly virtual gatherings have given leaders across the country, whether supported by large teams or unique within their chanceries, a sense for a broader range of possibilities than they had yet encountered on their own.

Stepping beyond the Zoom screen, this week, twenty-four leaders working at the intersection of faith and property gathered on Notre Dame’s campus to kick off two years of ongoing formation, fellowship, and project-based work to advance understanding and practice in this area. A collaboration with Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life, this second edition of the Eucharistic Culture Project is designed to form church leaders and real estate professionals as they undertake individual projects meant to integrate Eucharistic spirituality with the pastoral and practical challenges raised by church property. Over the next two years, through a mix of in-person, virtual, and international experiences, this diverse group will develop new models for understanding and stewarding church property for mission.

I hope you can see what the Diocesan Networking Group and the ECP have in common: these are places where practice evolves, where one can question the status quo, where solutions emerge out of new encounters and new ways of framing problems. Programs like these create apprenticeship opportunities between a diocesan construction company and a Catholic trade school. They lead to informal meetings of geographically-near peers. They kickstart a mission-driven real estate professional’s career, and provide a space for a retired investment banker to lend his expertise,

A university, even a university with resources like Notre Dame’s, cannot fix the Church’s property problems directly. It cannot keep every steeple standing or find the perfect reuse for every empty convent. But its research and education, rooted in mission, can do something ultimately far more significant, and longer-lasting: it can equip people to be the Church through their own vocations–and to direct property, in a thousand different ways, to serve that end.