Over the summer, Saint Paul Catholic Student Center on Wichita State’s campus is having construction done to add more parking spaces and a rectory — a priest’s residence. 

St. Paul loaned about half an acre of land to WSU in the 1980s to help the university expand and recently asked for the land back so they could do these developments. 

“If you’re here during the day, it’s a madhouse trying to park and there’s often cars in the grass and not finding any parking at all for midday mass, for our dollar lunches, things like that, so we needed to add parking,” Father Drew Hoffman said. “We needed to add a second access road. Right now there’s only one way in and out of St. Paul… it was kind of dangerous actually.”

Hoffman said the current rectory at St. Paul is only big enough for one priest and is getting old. They wanted to expand the space to increase the amount of priests that could live there and create a space to host events for students. 

“The priesthood is very lonely if you’re living by yourself, and so even just having another person to live life with in the community and share meals with is a really healthy thing for a priest to do,” Hoffman said. “So that’s why they asked us actually — the kind of powers that be — asked us to make a bigger rectory, so that guys (priests) could live together and we think that would be a great life giving thing for the community.”

There will also be some plumbing and electricial improvements made to the building and in total the construction will cost about $1.7 million. The construction is being funded completely by the savings St. Paul has accumulated over the past few years. 

“We have dreams of other expansion and building more. Because we’re out of space, this was just a first phase to get some things done that needed to get done, that will let us — we hope — do some bigger things down the line,” Hoffman said. “Our dream would be a larger chapel.”

Hoffman said the space being renovated will be left kind of open, so there is room for future expansions. 

“A dedicated chapel space that is more fitting, and then renovating the current chapel space and the basement to give us more room,” Hoffman said. “We’re just often out of room for bible studies, for our dollar lunches… we wanted to put ourselves into a position, whether it’s in a year, whether it’s in five, so there can be some dreams of some more going on.”