CHICAGO (OSV News) – The Chicago-based Catholic Extension Society has learned a thing or two over the years about the importance of sacred spaces.
Since its founding in 1905, the nonprofit that supports U.S. mission dioceses has helped build and repair more than 13,000 church structures in the country. And it anticipates supporting 40 more sacred spaces in 2025 alone.
"Sacred spaces are a prophetic message to future generations, and a love note to generations passed," Catholic Extension said. "They offer us beauty, which is essential to our survival, as they help us transcend a world where there are often-sobering realities. They are where we find our existential bearings amid the twists and turns of life."
Catholic Extension posted a reflection on its website, www.catholicextension.org, prompted by the official grand reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in December, following five years of pain-staking restoration work after a catastrophic fire ripped through the iconic Gothic structure in 2019. Renovations are to continue through 2026.
"Notre Dame Cathedral's restoration signals the immense importance of our work to rebuild and repair churches," it stated, adding that the celebration of the church's reopening "is a powerful example of just how essential sacred spaces are to humanity. Notre Dame has captured the hearts and minds of people of many nations, believers and non-believers alike."
"A sacred space is not a luxury item, but rather a response to a basic human need.
In addition to food, shelter, and clothing, humans naturally crave and require beauty in their lives as a matter of survival," Catholic Extension said. "Beauty, which is made accessible to us in sacred spaces, elevates our gaze to see that there is a deeper dimension to our lives than what appears on the surface. Sacred spaces allow us to locate the divine in our midst."
The "towering Gothic arches" of Notre Dame "invite its visitors to keep looking upward toward greater heights," Catholic Extension added. "Its architecture is the perfect metaphor for the transcendent impact that all sacred spaces have on humanity. 'Keep your head up!' they tell us."
Catholic Extension's mission since its founding has been to build up Catholic faith communities in underserved regions by raising funds to help these communities. In addition to helping rebuild and restore churches, it provides other resources in mission dioceses, many of which are rural and/or cover a large geographic area and have limited personnel and pastoral resources.
Accompanying the Extension article is a U.S. map covered with dots representing the churches Catholic Extension has helped restore or rebuild. In Texas alone, there are over 1,400 of these structures spread across the state's 15 Catholic dioceses.
One of these is Sacred Heart Church in Hidalgo, Texas, in the Diocese of Brownsville. The parish needed a bigger church to accommodate a rapidly growing Catholic community in an area where nearly a third of the people live below the poverty level. In 2018, the faithful gathered with bishops, priests and deacons for a special Mass celebrating the parish's new church, constructed in 2018.
The church "stood as a permanent reminder that this was truly 'their house' where God's presence and beauty would dwell among them," Catholic Extension said.
In 2023, St. Peter Claver Parish in Lexington, Kentucky – a parish in the Lexington Diocese founded many years ago by emancipated slaves – was building a new church to accommodate its growing and diverse community -- African American, Filipinos, Koreans and the Congolese community.
Among the sacred spaces – or more "Notre Dames" – set to be reopened in the coming year is the worship space for the faithful at San Juan Diego Mission in Adair County, Oklahoma, one of the state's "poorest counties," Catholic Extension said. The Catholic community there has been worshipping in a run-down storefront for decades. Adair County is in the Diocese of Tulsa and Eastern Oklahoma.
In Wenatchee, Washington, in the Yakima Diocese, a community of mostly agricultural workers has grown so large that they no longer fit in their 180-seat church. "On weekends, when 1,400 people regularly show up for Mass, more people fit outside than inside," Catholic Extension said. "Their sacred space" is being expanded "so that all may enter."
"The structures we help build are often quite simple, architecturally speaking," the mission organization said. "But the effect of these sacred spaces on the lives of their communities is equal to – if not greater than – that of Notre Dame Cathedral."
