Rebuilding our churches.

The cathedral was built in the 1840s, long before anyone designing a church would have been asked to calculate its carbon footprint. By the time a major restoration began, the building was suffering from water ingress, poor insulation, inefficient heating and lighting, high energy costs and inadequate facilities.

The Diocese of Salford had meanwhile committed itself to reaching net zero by 2038. The restoration therefore presented a question larger than how to preserve an important historic building. “Our original project ambition was to repair, conserve and sustain,” the cathedral team explains, “creating what we hoped would become one of the most sustainable cathedrals in the United Kingdom.”

The restoration touched almost every hidden system that makes a building habitable: the roof above worshippers, the floor beneath them, the glass between the sanctuary and the weather. Insulation was added where the historic structure allowed it; secondary glazing protected stained glass while reducing heat loss; rainwater and drainage were reconsidered; construction waste was closely managed. Much of the ecological work was designed, quite literally, to disappear into the building.

The cathedral had hoped to draw heat from the aquifer beneath Salford. On paper, the idea belonged neatly inside a net-zero future. In practice came boreholes, approvals, cost and the stubborn limitations of a nineteenth-century structure. Even the roof could not carry all the insulation the team would have preferred.

Sustainability, they discovered, was not the art of imposing the perfect solution. It was the slower work of asking what this particular building could bear and what could be prepared now for whoever comes next.

“Start with a clear vision and recognise that sustainability is a long-term journey rather than a single project,” the team advises other faith communities. “Understand your building thoroughly and focus first on improving the fabric: keeping water out, improving insulation where possible, and reducing energy loss.”

That advice is not only architectural. It is also pastoral.

The cathedral team found that people responded most when sustainability was not presented as an independent technical agenda, but connected to the building’s purpose. The project was protecting a sacred place, conserving its history and making it viable for generations who had not yet entered it.

There was no nineteenth-century Gothic roof to insulate. The immediate concerns were rising electricity consumption, rapidly increasing power costs and frequent interruptions to the electrical grid.

The Bishop’s Home and St. John Mary Vianney Seminary had already been early adopters of renewable energy. Rooftop solar systems were installed in 2018, when Bishop Gerardo Alminaza was among the Philippine Church leaders publicly advocating a transition away from fossil fuels. Eight years later, however, the original systems had become too small for buildings whose electricity use had more than doubled.

At the Bishop’s Home, 108 solar panels now cover substantial areas of the green roof, connected to hybrid inverters and battery storage. At St. John Mary Vianney Seminary, another 48 panels feed a separate hybrid system. The project presentation shows the contrast clearly: aerial photographs taken before installation show broad, uninterrupted roofs; afterward, those same surfaces have become part of the buildings’ energy infrastructure.

For Daniel Del Rosario of WeGen Energy Philippines, however, the more revealing part of the project is not the panels.

For more than two years, the proposal waited. Then a German development partner helped connect the diocese with financing from the Archdiocese of Cologne. The arrangement contained an unusual idea: San Carlos would repay the money without interest, but those repayments would remain in the Philippines to help another Church institution make its own transition.

“One church helping another church in solidarity and synodality,” Del Rosario calls it. The hope is that one investment can become the financial beginning of another, and then another. The buildings remain local. The responsibility is shared.

This matters particularly in San Carlos because Bishop Alminaza’s ecological leadership had long been associated with public advocacy. Del Rosario recalls his opposition to proposed coal-fired power plants at a time when renewable energy was often dismissed as too expensive to provide a practical alternative.

Today, he argues, that calculation has changed. “The time has come that beyond advocacy for renewable energy and protest against fossil fuel—it is time for application, for action,” he says, “and let the rooftop panels do the talking.”

In Hazard, Kentucky, that argument arrived in the form of an electricity bill. One of the last bills Mother of Good Counsel Catholic Church received before its new solar system came fully online was nearly $1,600.

The church itself dates to 1939 and was substantially remodeled in 2006. In 2025, the parish began seeking diocesan approval for another change to the building: 142 solar panels distributed across the church, office space and guest house. Lori Helfrich, the parish’s Parish Life Director, remembers strong support from parishioners and from Bishop John Stowe as the project moved forward. But there was also an increasingly practical reason to act. Electricity rates had risen significantly several times in five years, making the cost of simply maintaining parish life harder to ignore.

The first bills made the difference unusually visible. With the system operating at only partial solar coverage, the parish’s bill fell to around $400. Once the full system was online, Helfrich says the next two monthly bills were between $70 and $80. During those first months, the panels were producing roughly 30 to 40 percent more electricity than the parish was using. The figures are still an early snapshot rather than a long-term performance record, but for Helfrich, their meaning is already pastoral as well as financial.

“Installing the solar helps to make the parish more sustainable in the long term,” she explains, because money no longer absorbed by electricity can help cover “other utilities, programs, and facility upkeep,” while the parish also reduces its environmental impact.

Caritas Pakistan Karachi works from its diocesan office while supporting community development, emergency relief and social-welfare programs. Keeping that work running requires electricity, and rising tariffs make the cost of simply operating an institution harder to separate from the cost of its mission.

In August 2026, Caritas installed solar panels at the office. Mansha Noor describes the decision in both economic and spiritual terms: reducing dependence on conventional electricity while bringing the institution’s daily operations into closer alignment with Laudato Si’.

For him, the electricity bill is not merely an administrative expense. Money no longer absorbed by energy costs can remain available for the communities Caritas exists to serve. In that sense, the solar panels do not sit beside the mission. They help protect the resources that make the mission possible.

The installation is still new, and its long-term financial effect will take time to measure. But people are already paying attention. Parish leaders and visitors have begun asking whether similar systems could work in their own institutions. That possibility matters because institutional change often spreads this way: one building makes a different choice, others see that it is possible, and a technical decision becomes something another community can imagine for itself.

As Noor puts it, translating Laudato Si’ into the physical life of an institution requires “strong institutional leadership, a clear long-term vision for cost-efficiency, and viewing sustainability not as an added expense, but as an investment in our shared mission.”