I think in most demolish-and-redevelop projects the costs of demolition are typically a relatively minor factor — demolishing a redundant church to redevelop the site will usually be no more expensive than demolishing any other redundant building to redevelop a site.
What might be a factor is any kind of zoning or heritage restriction if the church has architectural or artistic merit that attracts legal protection. But presumably that would only be a minority of churches.
A bigger issue would, I think, be that in many cases the factors which lead to a church becoming redundant — depopulation of the neighbourhood might be a typical one — also undermine alternative uses for the building, or the site. If there’ aren’t enough people to support a church, other community-oriented services that could fit into a church building (a performance centre, arts venue, library) are not likely to be viable either. Redvelopment of the site for residential use may not be attractive if the area is undergoing depopulation — there is excess residential property there already. Similarly it might not be an attractive site for a public-facing commercial or retail businss. So revelopment of the site for industrial or office use might be the most economically viable option, provided the church building can be demolished and the zoning permits industrial or office use.
I don’t know whether this page answers some questions: About | St. John the Apostle Roman Catholic Church | Leesburg, VA
It’s about a Catholic parish in Virginia that outgrew its small, older building, so they weren’t founding a new church, just constructing a new building, but their outline of the process may give some insight.
I saw this church around 15 years ago when the new building was under construction, and what was interesting to me, living outside NYC where parishes are closing/consolidating, is that fact that quite a number of Catholic parishes in the South are growing.
Effect of demographic rearrangement — the places with jobs and more affordable living gain more working-and-raising-kids-age residents (including those moved from the rust belt and the newer waves of immigrants) so parishes grow, and it would be especially noticeable in the South where relative Catholic presence used to be much lower so now they need to build up. Meanwhile up in the old industrial cities that used to be the homes of large Irish, Central European, Italian Catholic communities, not only is that population segment declining but there is also a much higher generational loss in church affiliation among those who remain, so contraction is in order.
I assume also the financial/legal entities are at the diocese level, and this i why it’s the diocese that could have financial trouble if sued over child abuse allegations, not the Vatican. (Plus it’s the bishops who are responsible for assigning and moving priests).
Mostly, formal property ownership is at the diocesan level, but arrangements can vary from place to place — the product of different legal systems, different histories, etc. So in some places there might be more property ownership below the diocese, at parish level, or above it, in some national structure.
Religious orders are separate — they sit alongside the dioceses but are not part of them. The organisation of religious orders varies. In some cases each abbey has a high degree of independence, and owns its own property; in others, the order will be organised into geographical units, each often called a “province”, and ownership will be at the provincial level. In any country a religious order might have a few provinces, or just on province covering the whole country, or the country might form just part of a province that also includes other countries.
Legal liablity doesn’t automatically follow property ownership, but in fact the two are commonly linked because religions (and other movements) tend to organise themselves in ways where the people who get to make the decisions about property get to make other decisions also, so property ownership and control of the body’s operations tend to be vested in the same people. Plus, the people worth suing are the ones that own the property, so plaintiffs will generally try to make the case that those are the people with control of operations, and therefore responsibility for them.
The courts here in Aus have created a slightly closer relationship – it’s the churches money if the church is the beneficiary, even though the church did not have control.
In that case, I don’t think that the parties were really fighting (I wasn’t close to the case), it was partly “we can’t pay damages because our founding documents say we have a separate legal responsibility, so it will have to go through the courts”
Religious orders can also put themselves at the service of a diocese. For instance, there’s a missionary order based in Africa whose name I can’t remember, most of whose members are African, who sends priests to the US. Once here, the local bishop can assign them as pastor to any of the churches in the diocese (for instance, both the pastor and assistant pastor of my church are from this order), but of course an American bishop had no authority to tell them to come here in the first place.
There are also a number of parish priests in Cleveland who are members of the Benedictine abbey in town. There, the diocese would have a little more authority over them, since their abbey is within the boundaries of the diocese, but only a little: Mostly, they’re under the control of the abbot, who is, administratively speaking, almost equivalent in power to a bishop (sacramentally speaking, they’re still not equivalent).
Arrangements like that are not uncommon. And, while the priest of the order is servin in the parish, he has the same relationship to the bishop as any other parish clergy do. But, strictly speaking, its the individual priest who is at the servcie of the bishop while he’s in that role, not the religious order.
All the abbey needs to establish itself within the boundaries of the diocese is the permission of the bishop to establish itself. But that doesn’t give the bishop any authority over the operations of the abbey; that’s the business of the abbot, who is not responsible to or appointed by the bishop. If the bishop is unhappy with what is going on at the abbey, all he can tell it to do is to leave his diocese. That’s pretty much the nuclear option, but he doesn’t have any less drastic options open to him. (In terms of his authority, that is; obviously he can raise his concerns with the abbey and try to reach an agreed solution. Or, if the abbot is responsible to someone higher up within the religous order, he can ask that person to intervene.)
My understanding — which could easily be wrong — was that this development was a statutory one. (Of course, it could be that it was something done by the courts in one state, and then adopted by statute in other states.)