Good to Know: Parish Property

By The Catholic Week
This week's Good to Know focuses on parish property and why parishes in the Archdiocese of Mobile were separately incorporated beginning in 2009.

Q: Does the Archbishop or the Archdiocese own all the parish properties?
A: Parishes own their parish property. Each parish is its own corporation with a board of directors. The Archdiocese started switching to this method of parish property ownership in 2009. 

Q: Why did this change in 2009? 
A: There was an archaic legal structure in place dating back to the 19th century. Bishop Edward P. Allen, who served from 1897 to 1926 implemented this structure. Under this structure a corporation, called “Archbishop of Mobile Corp.” owned all parish properties.  However, in 1917 the Church changed the laws of the Church, stating that parishes should own their own property.  The new laws made the parishes truly distinct from the Archdiocese.  Some dioceses started implementing this right away, but Archbishop Toolen, Bishop May, and Archbishop Lipscomb never changed the structure.  

Q: What did Archbishop Rodi do?
A: When Archbishop Rodi arrived in 2008, he wanted to make sure the Archdiocese of Mobile was following Church law. It also makes sense that parishes own their own buildings because the parishioners have largely donated the money for these buildings.  In 2009, the Archdiocese began separately incorporating parishes.  

Q: What did this involve? 
A: Besides the creation of all the separate corporations, through legal processes, the Archdiocese had to transfer the ownership of all parish buildings to each of the parishes.  A parish generally has more than one building and sometimes those buildings are on separate pieces of property. This means that the Archdiocese had to transfer about one hundred and fifty pieces of property to each of the parishes.  

Q: Have all the parishes been through this process?
A: Yes. All the parishes have been separately incorporated, and each parish now owns its own property. It was a serious undertaking to create the corporations and to transfer all the various pieces of property, but now the civil legal structure of the Archdiocese matches what is expected by the laws of the Church.