Paul Lang has a vision for the Church. It is a vision he has been asked to present to the Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate (F.I.R.E.) at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind., and one he will be giving a speech on there in November.
Lang, who recently started his position as the coordinator of real estate and construction for the Diocese of Madison, has titled his paper and talk “Repurposing Obsolete and Vacant Structures.” In it, he speaks about “what we can do to recycle our parishes.”
By “recycle,” he means what we can do to prevent valuable and historic structures from being trashed when the church building they are in is no longer in use. He spoke specifically of stained glass windows, iconography, and pews, just to name a few items that he feels could and should be repurposed.
“If we do sell a structure, what becomes of it?” said Lang. “Nine times out of 10, it’s going into the dumpster. That is hard for a person like myself to accept, so I try to envision where we can use these things.”
His proposal is for the church to label, catalog, and store items that could be reused in future projects.
“So here we have a new structure going up; it needs stained glass windows. Here we have stained glass windows. We have a way to repurpose the material,” he said. “Not only are we reducing the cost of construction, but we are making the old live again in something new.”
Currently, he’s been working on a project to help remodel St. Bernard Church in Madison.
“In that church, we have a lot of oak and walnut,” he said. “Just the thought of throwing that in the dumpster is disturbing, so I strip it, I clean it, and I preserve it. I use it for something else that the church needs.”
Working for the diocese
In terms of his new position at the diocese, he said what he does is pretty varied. Primarily, his aim is to help priests oversee parish construction projects. He helps them organize their projects with contractors, makes recommendations, oversees blueprints, and helps with design and construction issues.
“It can be as simple as just a roof replacement or as complex as a new construction,” he said. “I drive to most parishes that need work. I like to meet our parish priests face to face. I like to meet their construction teams, their church teams that are organizing their projects.”
Lang said that the benefit of working with him is that there’s not much in construction he doesn’t understand. Construction is his passion, and he holds a Ph.D. in construction management with an emphasis on project management.
“I’ve been in construction all my life,” he said. “Designed everything I built, [and] built everything from Marriott Hotels to Kwik Trip gas stations. [I] designed a lot of residences. So my background in construction has been varied.”
He said his father — who is now deceased — was probably the most influential person to have sparked his passion for construction. When he was seven or eight years old, he helped his father build an addition to their family home.
“I learned a lot about construction then,” he said. “I liked it. It was intriguing to me even at a young age.”
Eventually, through his work experience, the opportunity came to remodel something that had been built at the turn of the 20th century. His first project like that was working on St. Rose Convent in La Crosse, Wis. He said the work involved having to manufacture a lot of the cutters and tools that they used back then to match the moldings and trim. The goal was overall to make it nearly impossible to be able to tell the old from the new.
“I learned how to do that,” he said. “My apprenticeship was very detailed. It was in depth. People saw talent in me and they chose to bring me along. It is something that I’ll always remember and be thankful for.”
When it comes to construction, he said he loves “every facet of it from the ground up. It doesn’t matter what part it is. When I look at blueprints, I can see it completely done in three dimension, so I’m very familiar with the structure even before it breaks ground.”
In his new position with the diocese, he says he enjoys bringing his understanding, knowledge, and skills to help guide priests and church building committees on their own projects.
“Once they embark on that path, I don’t leave them,” he said. “I walk with them as much as I can throughout the entire process. This creates a phenomenal relationship between me and our priests. The construction team [begins] to trust your senses as well as your judgment on a construction process.”
He explained this helps keep priests and parish committees informed and knowledgeable when they are working with their contractors.
“In the last three months, I’ve probably put on a little over 1,500 miles [visiting parishes],” he said. “We have a big diocese. It goes from Berlin all the way down to Cassville, and it’s a long stretch. I’ve been to both areas.”
In terms of who he recommends to priests, he said there are many contractors in the area who work well with Catholic architecture.
“A lot of our construction people are Catholic and they are faith-based,” he said. “I will always try to look for that first because they understand what we’re [trying to do] with our projects.”
His faith
In terms of his own faith, Lang said that his “faith walk deepened when I was probably in my early 20s.”
While Baptized Catholic as an infant, he said his upbringing never got him very acquainted with the Catholic faith. He spent a period of time going to Protestant churches before returning to his Catholic heritage with his wife 13 years ago.
“I’m going to say that Protestants make the best Catholics simply because we learn our Bible as a Protestant from cover to cover,” he said. “We learn every book of the Bible, all the Gospels, all the laws. We know it all as far as the book teaches us, minus a few other books that Protestants have tossed out of their history.”
His return to Catholicism came about when he realized that Protestant parishes were “some form of split pea soup from our Catholic churches, and I quote Scott Hahn on that,” he said.
Returning to Catholicism involved a journey of digging deeper into the history of the Church and developing an even deeper faith than he had as a Protestant.
“You start to realize, you start to see and sense, what the altar means and how you bring that alive again with Christ’s ever presence in our world,” he said.
Lang will give his talk at the F.I.R.E. conference at the University of Notre Dame in South, Bend, Ind., on November 7. The theme of the conference is “The Future of Church Property.”
For more information about the Diocese of Madison’s Diocesan Building Commission visit madisondiocese.org/real-estate