Expanding Faith: Immaculate Catholic Church undergoing $3.4M renovation

Don Wilkins, Messenger-Inquirer, Owensboro, Ky.
Updated ·2 min read

Sep. 23—The inside of Immaculate Catholic Church, 2516 Christie Pl., has been emptied to allow for a multimillion-dollar renovation project.

Crews have already removed the pews, ceiling tiles and started prepping the 58-year-old church's main entrance for expansion.

Matt Gray, director of music/liturgy who's heading up Immaculate's building committee, said the project has been in the works since 2017.

Gray added that Immaculate built a new $1 million-plus wing in 1995 for offices and its parish family center, but the church had remained untouched since it was built in 1965.

"We formed a committee to develop a strategic plan for the parish; that's typical in the Catholic church to look at revitalizing the parish and how do we do that?" Gray said. "So we came up with a three-year plan to do that, and part of that was renovation of the church."

Prior to construction, the building committee brought in Martin Erspamer, a monk at St. Meinrad Archabbey in southern Indiana, to act as its liturgical artist and liturgical consultant.

Gray said Erspamer helped guide the committee during its design process.

"He led us in how to renovate a church, because the Catholic church has a lot of guidelines and elements that have to be there," Gray said. "So we had to study all of that for about a year."

Three years ago the committee thought it was prepared to go forward with what was then a $2-million renovation project.

But then COVID-19 happened.

"We revealed the (design) plans to the parish in March 2020, and we all know what happened in March of 2020 — the world shut down," he said. "We were pretty nervous about starting a (capital) campaign while the church was shut down. That basically put us on hold for two more years."