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The Passionist Fathers who run St. Gabriel’s have just opened the doors to the greenest church in Canada, a $10.5-million replacement for the 50-year-old building which pastor Father Paul Cusak claims will be sorely missed by Toronto Hydro. Father Cusak told the crowd gathered for the official opening of the new St. Gabriel’s Sept. 21 he used to get a letter every year from the city utility company thanking St. Gabriel’s for heating North York through the winter.

The new St. Gabriel’s is on track to be the first church in Canada to meet the stringent requirements for Leadership in Energy and Environment Design silver certification. The U.S.-based LEED organization will certify the new building on the strength of a 40-percent reduction in energy consumption over a standard modern church built to code.

On the practical level, the parish should earn back its investment in leading edge environmental design in five to 10 years through reduced energy bills and other savings, said architect Roberto Chiotti.

But the church is really doing it for the theology. “We did this to make a statement that needs to be made today,” said Passionist Father Steve Dunn, founding director of the Elliott Allen Institute for Theology and Ecology.

The expression of a new, ecologically aware Catholic cosmology based on the work of Passionist theologian Father Thomas Berry is built right into the architecture. Instead of stained glass windows, a heat saving clear thermal glass wall looks out on a garden, connecting the congregation inside with God’s creation outside.

By building a church that’s a little easier on the planet, St. Gabriel’s is recognizing the urgency of the environmental crisis, said Father Cusak.

“We’re in a pivotal moment in our 15-billion-year history,” he said.

St. Gabriel’s was in the almost unique position of being able to sell most of the three-hectare site of the old church to a developer and rake in enough cash to employ architect Chiotti of Larkin Architect Limited to turn ecotheology into a parish church.

For most churches it’s a more modest matter of wading through a ton of bureaucracy to find out how they can retrofit their often historically significant buildings to save money and reflect a new sense of responsibility for the planet, said Denis Schmiegelow, a volunteer with the Coalition of Church Leaders, a provincial organization that includes the Ontario Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Smiegelow has spent two years volunteering on behalf of the province’s largest churches, trying to find out how Ontario’s thousands of churches can get a little government help auditing their energy use and coming up with a plan to renovate the buildings to reflect higher energy use standards.

“There’s a great lack of information about where to go for the right kind of information,” Schmiegelow told The Catholic Register.

Kairos, the national ecumenical social-justice coalition, has had two one-year $20,000 contracts with Natural Resources Canada to help churches access federal government money for energy audits and retrofits. Kairos is currently negotiating with Natural Resources Canada to extend the program one more year.

Through the Energuide for Existing Buildings program of Natural Resources Canada’s Office of Energy Efficiency, a church could receive $1 for every 278 kilowatt hours (one gigajoule) of energy savings it finds in an energy audit. That money would go toward paying for an energy audit certified by a professional engineer, up to a limit of $25,000 or 50 percent of the cost, whichever is less.

Ottawa offers another $7.50 per 278 kilowatt hours saved toward retrofitting a church up to a maximum of $250,000 or 25 per cent of the retrofitting costs, whichever is less.

Kairos ecology expert Joy Kennedy runs workshops to help churches through the hoops of becoming a member of Energuide for Existing Buildings and finding the upfront financing to get the ball rolling. It’s a new challenge for most parishes, but one they should be able to handle, she said.

“People know how to finance organs,” she pointed out.

If parishioners can figure out how to come up with $15,000 to $20,000 to replace an aging, 40-percent efficient boiler with an 80-per-cent efficient modern boiler, the parish will probably earn back their investment in 18 months. Other measures, from replacing glass to reinsulating and recladding a building may take longer to pay for, but churches are in it for the long haul.

There are provincially financed programs to help churches save energy. Ontario Energy Minister Dwight Duncan was among those at the St. Gabriel’s opening, praising the forward-thinking parish.

“St. Gabriel’s is an important achievement,” Duncan said.

But the money for more modest and conventional energy savings plans has been scarce and hard to access, reports Smiegelow. In 2005, Schmiegelow made the case for provincial funding to retrofit churches to the Ministry of Energy and received a sympathetic hearing from then Energy Minister Donna Cansfield. Later that year Ministry officials told him that funding for churches could be had from the newly created Conservation Bureau, a division of the Ontario Power Authority.

But by the spring of 2006 funding for energy audits and retrofit programs was in the hands of local distribution companies – everything from municipal public utility corporations in small-town Ontario to the giant, semi-privatized Hydro One.

Thus far Schmiegelow, acting on behalf of the largest churches in the province, has been unable to find out just what programs these companies might be able to offer churches. The province sent $160 million to them for conservation programs in 2005.

So far the only provincial money which has surfaced inside a church comes from a $122,000 grant from the Conservation Bureau to an ecumenical and interfaith organization, called Faith and the Common Good. The provincial money helps finance a Faith and the Common Good project called Greening Sacred Spaces, which also has City of Toronto financing through the Toronto Atmospheric Fund.

Greening Sacred Spaces coordinator Rory O’Brien concedes it’s not a lot of money – about enough to finance 10 energy audits and no retrofits.