The sun is still shining through stained glass windows of the sanctuary at St. Ladislas Church in Columbus. But the pews and the pulpit are gone.
With fewer practicing Catholics in Columbus’s south side, the church held its last service in June of 2023. It’s been vacant ever since.
But soon, it'll serve a new purpose.
The former church is set to become a drop-in center for homeless youth, providing everything from food and washing machines to child care and case management.
Star House, the organization that runs the shelter, is completely renovating the 26,000-square-foot property top to bottom to fit the needs of the organization.
"We've nearly doubled the number of young people we've served since 2021, so we not only need to expand into the south side to meet the unique needs of young people who live in that neighborhood, but also to offset any sort of capacity issues we might have at our current location,” said Ann Bischoff, CEO of Star House.
“This is so important because our community shelters have wait lists in the hundreds, and our drop-in center offers a space where they have immediate access to what they need.”
The drop-in shelter is among the latest Ohio holy sites to be converted into a secular space.
In Columbus, the First Baptist Church built in 1898 is now a music venue. In Cincinnati, St. Patrick’s Church is now home to the bar Urban Artifact. And in Cleveland, the former Holy Ghost Byzantine Catholic Church has become a wedding and event space.
These spiritual-turned-secular spaces are cropping up as Christianity in the U.S. declines.
Ryan Burge is a political science professor at Eastern Illinois University and a former pastor in the American Baptist Church.
He said younger generations are getting less religious, so as baby boomers pass away, churches across the country are seeing fewer patrons. Some are shutting down altogether, opening up valuable real estate.
“Many of those churches have been around for 200 or 300 years, and [are in] areas that are some of the priciest real estate on Earth,” Burge said. “There's a huge incentive to sell off those properties to developers because they're going to write huge checks in the millions of dollars for those buildings.”
Burge said some individual dioceses of the Catholic Church in particular face financial strain. That’s not only because of low church attendance, but also because they’re paying off settlements to people affected by the Church’s sexual abuse scandal.
“These individual dioceses are sort of independent units in many ways. So for instance, the lawsuits for the sexual abuse crisis, those are being paid out by the local diocese. They're not getting paid out by the Vatican,” Burge said.
Converting Catholic churches comes with particular challenges too: The buildings have to be deconsecrated before they’re officially used for a nonreligious purpose.
“What they would prefer is that another church would take it over. That's preferable to being used for a completely secular purpose. But even a secular purpose is allowable, but not a ugly or sordid purpose,” said Dan Cheely, the Director of Evangelization at the Church of St. Mary of the Angels, a Catholic church in Chicago.
The Columbus diocese didn’t agree to speak on the record, but Cheely said the Star House’s purpose to help the needy is a good use for a former church.
Star House’s Vice President of Development Ben Sears is excited to watch the building’s transformation.
“I met several people that went to school here 40 some years ago, or more people that talked about meeting their partners and getting married in the space,” Sears said. “That has been really cool to connect with the history of the church.”
But now, Sears is helping to prepare the building for the future.
“This main structure that used to house the organ, which kind of looks like a house already, we're going to build out in what we call our hub, and that's the main center point where anybody in the building can access resources, like clothing, the laundry services, showers, bathrooms, anything they might need,” he said.
The former church will still serve the community, just in a different way.