Churches and Religious Heritage in Transformation — COMECE, Brussels

The building on Square de Meeûs is an unusual place to talk about churches: it is the Brussels secretariat of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union, three streets from the European Parliament. On 22 and 23 September 2026 it hosts an international symposium on what happens to a church when the congregation that built it is no longer there to fill it — Churches and Religious Heritage in transformation. The potential of sacred spaces as “third” and “fourth” places.

The phrase in the title is the argument. A “third place” is the ground between home and work — the café, the library, the square. The symposium proposes that a church can be something beyond even that: a “fourth place”, a space that does not fit the familiar categories at all, and whose value lies precisely in not being reducible to them. It is a more interesting question than the usual one about conversions into flats and climbing gyms, because it asks what a building of this kind still does for a town before asking what it could be turned into.

The two days gather researchers and practitioners from across Europe, among them Anna Minta of the Catholic Private University of Linz, Chiara L. M. Occelli and Irene Ruiz Bazán, Krzysztof Nawratek, Sven Sterken, Mariateresa Giammetti and Roel de Ridder, with Fr. Manuel Barrios Prieto for COMECE. Rural religious heritage, churches and mosques in transformation, and the practical work of keeping a sacred space in use run through the programme. It grows out of a New European Bauhaus Lab held in November 2025, and is organised with the Catholic Private University of Linz, Future for Religious Heritage and the Museum der Baukultur NRW.

Practical details

• When: Tuesday 22 September 2026 from 4pm, closing with an evening reception; Wednesday 23 September 2026 from 8.30am, closing with lunch
• Where: COMECE Secretariat, Square de Meeûs 19/1, Ixelles, Brussels, Belgium
• Admission: open to the public
• Booking: registration is strongly recommended, through the form linked on COMECE’s own page for the symposium

Full details and the registration form are on COMECE’s own site. Cultural Heritage Online lists this event for readers following the future of religious heritage in Europe; registration is handled directly by the organisers.