The Diocese of Buffalo, New York, has been in the news this week after a years-old property sale went viral on social media.
The church of St. Anne, along with the adjacent parish rectory, school and convent, in downtown Buffalo sold for $250,000 in 2022 as part of a major restructuring of parishes, following years of declining Mass attendance and financial difficulties for the diocese.
Originally built in 1886 by and for the city’s burgeoning German immigrant community, the church has been out of use for Mass for more than a decade after falling into disrepair and needing significant, costly refurbishments.
While American Catholics have grown used to the sad reality of historic church buildings being closed, demolished, converted into other uses, and sold as local ecclesiastical demographics shift, the St. Anne’s sale attracted widespread notice this week because of the buyers: Buffalo Crescent Holdings, an affiliate of the Downtown Islamic Center, which plans to turn the site into a mosque.
Although the sale, the buyer, and their plans for the site have been known and reported for nearly two years, a post on twitter.com this week sent the details circulating on social media, with some questioning the propriety of selling a (albeit disused and unusable) church building to be turned into a non-Christian place of worship.
So, what does canon law say about disposing of church buildings? What is and isn’t an acceptable fate for a former church?
The Pillar explains.
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When a church building can no longer be used for sacred worship, is regarded as beyond repair, or if “other grave causes suggest [it] can no longer be used for divine worship,” canon law allows it to be deconsecrated — relegated, in canonical language, to “profane use” — a technical term meaning secular.
“Deconsecrated” churches are sometimes repurposed for Catholic apostolates — renovated into lecture halls, food banks, or even shelters. They are more often sold to buyers intent on a secular use of the space, planning to turn old churches into condos or restaurants.
But the Church does not permit that former churches ever be put to “sordid use.” The phrase is another technical term, which denotes some sacrilegious, immoral, or scandalous purpose.
The idea is that a space once set aside for baptisms, confessions, weddings, and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass should not become a place designated for some offensive purpose — it would be disrespectful to the sacraments offered there, to the priests who offered them, to the Catholic laity who sacrificed to build the place, and who worshiped God there.
Of course, eventually the Church loses control of a building it is no longer using. A deconsecrated church might pass hands a few times, and eventually be used for some immoral purpose. Or a buyer might conceal his intention for a church building he’s bidding on.
While the diocesan bishop is ultimately the decision maker, he isn’t the only one with responsibility for assessing how suitable a potential buyer and their plans might be. Canon law requires that the sale of a former church building have approval from the diocesan bishop, the diocesan finance council, and the diocesan college of consultors, a body of senior priests in leadership positions.
But despite the frequency with which church buildings are sold in the modern era, exact regulations on what is or is not acceptable don’t really exist, though some dioceses which have closed a significant number of churches in recent years have developed vetting processes to ensure that a church building won’t be repurposed for offensive use after it is sold.
In 2013, the Vatican’s Congregation for Clergy emphasized that “under no circumstances can [a closed church] be alienated for use inconsistent with its dignity as a former church.”
Preferable to “sordid use,” the congregation emphasized, would be “demolition of the edifice.”
In discussing the notion of an “offensive purpose,” the Pontifical Council for Culture in 2018 emphasized “the need to avoid situations that can give offense to the religious sentiment of a Christian people,” and this can often be a local judgment, balancing inter-religious relations with real, sometimes profound theological problems thrown up by church sales.
While the planned conversion of the Buffalo church into a mosque has riled some online commentators, it is not without precedent elsewhere. Last year the church of St. Margaret Mary in Ottawa was bought for conversion into a mixed use site, including a mosque, in a move that was generally well received by local Catholics.
Meanwhile, in 2022, the New York Diocese of Rochester came under heavy criticism after approving the sale of a church to become a Hindu ashram, installing statues of pagan gods into what had previously been the church sanctuary and announcing that a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary which had been left in the church would be displayed alongside an image of Kali, the Hindu goddess of death.
The image of the Blessed Virgin was subsequently recovered by the diocese after reporting.
The Rochester diocese example underlines how little authoritative guidance there is from Rome on judging the line between “profane” and “sordid” use, and how subjectively such a distinction can be applied.
Installing statues depicting other gods in the very spot where the Mass was offered for years struck many Catholics as sacrilegious, the building’s deconsecration notwithstanding, while others saw the turning a church building over for Hindu rituals and ceremonies as a kind of laudable gesture of inter-religious cooperation, despite Sacred Scripture’s persistent warnings about worshiping any but the one true God.
American dioceses have actually seen even more controversial examples in recent decades.
In 2011, St. Mary Presentation Catholic Parish in the town of Deer Park, Washington, outgrew its parish church building, successfully raising funds for a new church and putting its former building up for sale.
While Masonic lodges are often seen as simple fraternal societies, where men of all religions and none can come together, leaving their differences at the door, in fact, the Church has always taught that Freemasonry has an explicitly religious nature, which is antithetical to Christianity — and the Catholic Church specifically.
The higher degrees of some Masonic branches, like the Royal Arch and Scottish Rites — whose membership has included some Deer Park Masons — have explicitly anti-Catholic rituals.
For that reason, canon law has always described Masonic lodges as “societies which plot against the Church.” The Church considers it a canonical crime for a Catholic to become a Mason, and maintains penalties for anyone who does so — including in the recently revised Book VI of the Code of Canon Law, promulgated by Pope Francis in 2021.
Despite the Church’s doctrinal and disciplinary opposition to Freemasonry, the sale of the Deerpark site went ahead.
Few canon lawyers would dispute that renovating a former church into a Masonic hall, when Masonic membership remains forbidden to Catholics, constitutes a “sordid use” of the building.
But sales of former churches like in Deer Park, Rochester, and Buffalo, are not as a general matter subject to Roman consultation or approval before the fact, and so they legitimately fall under the discretion of the diocesan bishop.
