A fight over a 16-foot by 39-foot grotto on a residential street in Park Hills, Kentucky, is now the vehicle for the Supreme Court's next reading of the federal law that governs religious land use. The Court granted certiorari on October 1 in Missionaries of Saint John the Baptist, Inc. v. Frederic, and it took a single question from the case: whether a land use regulation that prohibits a religious institution from building a religious structure on its own property imposes a substantial burden on religious exercise under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.
The grant was limited to the first of the two questions the church presented. The second, whether the same ordinance treats churches worse than comparable nonreligious uses, stays where the Kentucky courts left it. That choice shapes what the case can settle. The justices will decide how much a zoning denial has to cost a congregation before federal law calls it a burden, and they will say nothing about the street-frontage rule that produced the dispute, which the state courts found applies to hospitals and fire stations as well.
The grotto was small and the ordinance was categorical
Our Lady of Lourdes is a diocesan Catholic church in Park Hills, a small city just south of Cincinnati. The church sits on Amsterdam Road, which the zoning code classifies as a collector street, and it operates as a conditional use in a district zoned for single- and two-family homes. Next door, on Alhambra Court, is a parcel the church held under a perpetual lease from the Sheila Burke Trust, taken with the mutual intent to build a grotto there.
The plan was modest by the standards of church construction. The grotto would be set into a small hill beside the parking lot and would consist of a shrine to the Virgin Mary, a plaza, a walking path, and a retaining wall, 16 feet by 39 feet in all.
What made it a federal case was Section 10.4 of the Park Hills code, which allowed churches and other buildings for religious worship as a conditional use only if they sit adjacent to an arterial street. The grotto parcel faces a local street. Planning staff reviewed the application in April 2021 and recommended denial, telling the Board of Adjustment that the arterial requirement was a minimum requirement of the ordinance for conditional use. The church argued the point was moot, because Amsterdam Road had been an arterial street when the church was built and the structure should be treated as grandfathered.
The board said yes, a neighbor sued, and the lower courts split
The public hearing drew supporters and opponents, and the most common objection was traffic and parking that residents said were already a problem and would get worse. The Board of Adjustment voted 4-1 to grant both the conditional use permit and the setback variances, conditioned on the property being deeded to the church within six months. The dissenting member cited the arterial requirement and the traffic concerns.
Joel and Elizabeth Frederic, who live nearby, challenged the decision in Kenton Circuit Court. They won the first round on a nonconforming-use theory without the court reaching RLUIPA, and then lost the case twice on appeal. The Kentucky Court of Appeals reversed the Board, holding that it had allowed an enlargement of a nonconforming use contrary to state law and that the federal statute was not violated. The Kentucky Supreme Court took the case on discretionary review, said it had never addressed RLUIPA before, and affirmed on December 18, 2025.
Kentucky read the burden as one the church chose
The statute the church relied on bars a government from imposing a land use regulation that puts a substantial burden on religious exercise unless it can show a compelling interest and the least restrictive means of serving it. The Kentucky Supreme Court adopted the framework the Sixth Circuit set out in Livingston Christian Schools v. Genoa Charter Township as its polestar, and that framework asks two questions that decided this case: whether a feasible alternative location existed, and whether the institution's inability to use the land was self-imposed.
The court answered both against the church. It found the assertions that no alternative location existed to be conclusory, noted that the church never claimed it could not build a smaller grotto or shrine on the land it already owned, and held that by leasing a residentially zoned parcel whose use the ordinance did not directly permit, the church had imposed the burden on itself.
Federal courts have sorted substantial burden claims into rough categories over the years. The strongest involve a rule that forces a believer to act against religious practice, where the cost of refusing is a criminal sanction or the loss of a significant government benefit. Land use cases like this one fall into harder territory, where nothing is prohibited outright and the question is what a denial costs the institution relative to what the code would allow. The Kentucky court placed this dispute in the second category and found the cost too small to qualify.
The equality question was decided and then not taken
The church also attacked the ordinance on its face under the statute's equal terms provision, which forbids land use rules that treat a religious assembly or institution worse than a nonreligious one. Its argument was that the code requires churches to sit on arterial streets while exempting cemeteries and nursery schools.
The court read the list differently. It noted that institutions for higher education, hospitals, sanitariums, convalescent homes, nursing homes, homes for the aged, police stations, and fire stations all carry the same arterial-street condition in the Park Hills code. It added that one of the categories the church identified as exempt, parochial schools, is itself a religious institution, which undercut the claim that the ordinance singles out religion for worse treatment.
That reasoning is where the case's second question lived, and it is the one the justices declined to take. The church's petition argued that the comparison should be drawn against nonreligious assemblies of similar size and traffic rather than against the code's own list of conditional uses, a framing that would look past the ordinance's internal symmetry. Because the Court granted review only on the burden question, the Park Hills rule stands for now regardless of how the justices rule, and the broader fight over how municipalities may write conditional use lists will wait.
The Court will choose between two readings of the same words
The petition's central argument is that the Livingston framework is an outlier that drains the statute of force. The brief filed by the Manhattan Institute and the Napa Legal Institute supporting the church puts it bluntly, arguing that the framework leaves the law with little practical force in land-use disputes, and that other circuits apply tests more protective of religious exercise. The briefs note that appellate courts have never settled on one formula: the Eighth Circuit carried over a test that asks whether a burden falls on a central tenet of belief, while other courts have moved away from that approach.
The Frederics' lawyers at Skadden answered that there is no outcome-determinative split, that the variations in how courts phrase the standard would not change this case, and that a small parcel dispute is a poor vehicle for a national ruling. Review was granted anyway, which turns the vehicle argument from a reason to stay out into a reason to rule narrowly.
Support for review came from further afield than the parties. A group of states led by Kentucky's attorney general urged the Court to take the case, and the docket carries briefs from the National Association of Evangelicals, the Coalition for Jewish Values, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Sikh Coalition, a Wyoming Valley yeshiva, the American Center for Law and Justice, and religious liberty clinics at Notre Dame and Yale. The range of filers is itself an argument about what is at stake: the statute protects every religious assembly, and the standard the Court sets will apply to mosques, synagogues, and temples as much as to a Catholic shrine in northern Kentucky.
What the standard will decide for everyone who is not a church
The practical difference between the two readings is easy to state. If the Court keeps the self-imposed burden and alternative-location factors at the center of the inquiry, congregations that lose a permit fight will usually need to show that no smaller or relocated version of their project is possible, which is a demanding showing in a country full of underused parcels. If the Court moves toward a broader reading, more denials become federal claims, and municipalities will have to justify ordinary code decisions with a record that can survive strict scrutiny.
Both outcomes have costs that the briefs acknowledge. The churches and their allies describe a system where a handful of neighbors can effectively veto a congregation's use of its own land through procedural objections, which the amicus briefs call a veto exercised without any property right. The responding brief describes a federal statute that was never meant to displace local zoning any time a religious institution prefers a particular parcel, and warns that reading it broadly would put routine planning decisions under a standard few municipalities can meet.
The case also carries a constraint that the briefs do not dwell on, because it is procedural rather than doctrinal. A decision for the church would not order the grotto built. It would reopen the federal question in the state courts on a record that includes the Board's findings, the staff recommendation, and the neighbors' traffic evidence, and the Board's decision would still face the separate state-law rulings that it acted arbitrarily and that the permit enlarged a nonconforming use. The ordinance would stay on the books, and the next congregation in Park Hills would face the same arterial-street requirement.
The Court has not scheduled argument, and a decision would arrive by the end of June. Its reach would run well past a small hill beside a parking lot in a Cincinnati suburb.
Primary sources
- Supreme Court of the United States, Docket for Missionaries of Saint John the Baptist, Inc. v. Frederic, No. 25-1131, for the October 1, 2026 grant limited to Question 1, the December 18, 2025 decision below, and the amicus filings.
- Supreme Court of Kentucky, Missionaries of Saint John the Baptist, Inc. v. Frederic, No. 2024-SC-0006-DG (Dec. 18, 2025), for the facts of the grotto, the Board's 4-1 vote, the Livingston framework, the substantial burden and equal terms holdings, and Justice Thompson's separate opinion.
- Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000cc, for the substantial burden and equal terms provisions.
- Brief in Opposition of respondents Joel Frederic and Elizabeth Frederic (Aug. 14, 2026), for the arguments that no outcome-determinative split exists and that the case is a poor vehicle.
- Brief of the Manhattan Institute and the Napa Legal Institute as amici curiae supporting petitioner (Apr. 27, 2026), for the circuit split argument and the Seventh and Eighth Circuit comparisons.
- Catholic World Report, Supreme Court to hear case on lawsuit that blocked Marian shrine plan in Kentucky (Oct. 1, 2026), for the First Liberty Institute's response and the neighbors' stated concerns.