Recent acquisitions on the Brighton Campus. The Chestnut Hill Campus is just beyond.

On August 20, 2007, Boston College completed an agreement to purchase 18 acres of land and several buildings on the sprawling Brighton property owned for nearly a century by the Boston Archdiocese.

The $65 million purchase brings nearly all of what had been the Archdiocese’s 64.5-acre campus—containing athletic fields, rolling green meadows, and administrative buildings, and bordered by Commonwealth Avenue, Lake Street, and Foster Street—under University ownership. In 2004, Boston College purchased 43 acres from the Archdiocese for $99.4 million, a sale that included the former Cardinal’s Residence (20,000 square feet), St. William’s Hall (40,000 square feet), St. Clement’s Hall (94,000 square feet), an aged gymnasium, and several smaller structures. Two years later, the University bought the Archdiocese’s Lake Street Tribunal Building for $8 million.

The latest purchase includes four concrete or brick buildings constructed in the 1960s and renovated in the late 1990s: the Archdiocesan Chancery Office, Bishop Peterson Hall, a library used by students at St. John’s Seminary, and a library housing the Archdiocese’s archives. The Arch­diocese will retain ownership of the St. John’s Seminary building on Lake Street, a four-story stone building with Roman­esque-arched windows that has housed seminarians since 1884. The 200 employees of the Archdiocese currently working at the 66,000-square-foot Chancery will remain on the campus until next summer, when they plan to relocate to a 140,000-square-foot building in suburban Braintree.

Although the master plan for the new property is not yet set, the University has designated the nearly 62,000-square-foot Bishop Peterson Hall as the home for the proposed Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, to be created by a reaffiliation of the Weston Jesuit School of Theology with Boston College. The new school will also be made up of the Uni­versity’s Institute for Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry and will incorporate the online programs of the Church in the 21st Century Center. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, the Weston School was affiliated with Boston College, but in 1974 it received an independent charter from the state, following its move to Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2008, pending approval from the Vatican, the Weston School will relocate to Brighton. Its 80,000-volume library will join the St. John’s Seminary holdings in the newly acquired seminary library building and be accessible to Boston College students.

The small gymnasium is now being used by Boston College students as a rehearsal space and dance studio, and three University offices (including that of Boston College Magazine) have relocated to the new campus.

Read more by Cara Feinberg