St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church and Student Center, 2210 Lincoln Way, has completed most of a $5.2 million renovation project, and the church will be dedicating the new areas Saturday.

The Mass of Dedication will be held at the church Saturday at 7 p.m. Archbishop Jerome Hanus from Dubuque will perform the ceremony.

The church’s student center has been revamped to serve ISU students and parish members better, said John Donaghy, campus minister at St. Thomas Aquinas.

“We have more classroom space, a more spacious lounge. We’ve restored our library so it’s now a place for people to study in, too,” he said, adding the church’s worship space has also been remodeled. “It’s really to enhance our worship of God as a community.”

Kristen Schmitz, peer minister for St. Thomas Aquinas, said she thinks the new center will attract more students from Iowa State.

“The main advantage of the new student center is now it’s handicap accessible, and I think because of that it will be open to more students,” said Schmitz, senior in food science. “Hopefully, it will be a point where students will feel even more welcome than they did before. Just by [the center’s] open presence, students will be attracted to come inside and see the work that’s been going on the past year and use the space that’s available to them.”

Donaghy said parts of the church and student center not yet completed include the daily mass chapel, an outdoor prayer garden and a handicapped-accessible parking lot off Ash Avenue. Those should be completed by this fall.

One of the more interesting new features in the addition will be the names of the classrooms.

“We had a process in which we invited members of the parish to suggest names, and then there was a committee that looked at all those and submitted their list to the parish council,” Donaghy said.

In addition to specific names, the two largest rooms in the student center are called Prophets and Martyrs.

“Each of [the names] were chosen for a specific reason,” Donaghy said. “[Prophets and Martyrs] were chosen because we had a large number of names of people who were both traditional prophets and traditional martyrs and then modern prophets and modern martyrs. To include all those different people, we chose a more generic name.”

Everett Hemann, pastor at St. Thomas Aquinas, said the Mass of Dedication will be for both the new student center and the renovated church.

The ceremony will include many different aspects, Donaghy said.

“It’s a whole process where the place is blessed and consecrated,” he said. “There’s a special rite of dedication and a special worship service that’s part of that.”

Hemann said the church and center will be blessed by Archbishop Hanus and other pastors.

“There’s blessing with water; there’s smoking with incense; there’s anointing with oil, those kinds of things,” he said. “I’m the fourth pastor here, and there’s one point in the ceremony where the three previous pastors assist [Hanus].”

ISU students and some of the founding parish members will also participate in the mass, Hemann said.

The dedication ceremony is open to the public and will be followed by a reception.