Geulph, Canada - Wal-Mart has acknowledged God.
After a 10-year battle with its Jesuit neighbours in Guelph, Ont., the giant U.S. retailer has agreed to hide its store so that it won't be seen or heard by people communing with the divine next door.
In an agreement announced yesterday, Wal-Mart will install high berms designed by acoustical engineers and a "living wall" of willows and six-metre-high cedars between its development and the Jesuits' 240-hectare spiritual retreat on Guelph's northern boundary.
If the store's presence and traffic noise still intrude on religious practices at the Jesuit centre -- typically people go there for weekend-long or eight-day silent retreats -- the agreement requires Wal-Mart to take further action.
The Jesuits and a Guelph interfaith coalition in return will drop a court case claiming infringement of their Charter rights to freedom of religion.
An appeal of an Ontario Municipal Board decision allowing the store to be built also will be abandoned.
The negotiations were tough, said Toronto lawyer Eric Gillespie, counsel for the faith group. The deal was brokered by senior OMB official Wilson Lee.
Both sides agreed not to talk about what went on.
Rev. James Profit, spiritual director of the Jesuit centre -- a 93-year-old tract of farmland, meadows, woodlots and hermit cabins -- would say only that he and Wal-Mart officials "walked the land" together.
He also acknowledged some disappointment that the courts won't be asked to rule on whether silence and the night's darkness have legal as well as spiritual sanctity in the exercise of religion.
"It would have been nice. But it would have consumed a lot of resources. It would have been a very expensive answer," he said.
Mr. Gillespie also pointed to the risk of losing the case.
The Charter challenge was made against a Guelph bylaw allowing construction. But once the court granted Wal-Mart standing in the case, Mr. Gillespie said, it was a signal that the court intended to look at a balance of rights, not just religious rights.
If a court had heard the case, it would have gone where no court has gone before.
The courts have ruled in the past that property owners have no right to light, or view, or access to wind -- or, by extension, to darkness or silence.
The big question is whether a claim to Charter rights would have trumped those rulings, said University of Toronto law professor Ed Morgan, one of Canada's leading Charter scholars.
The centre attracts retreatants from all over the world, but mainly from heavily populated Southern Ontario and upstate New York. Guelph is about 80 kilometres southwest of Toronto.
The hermit cabins on the property are used for solitary living.
The land is also used for aboriginal and eastern religious practices.
"I really do feel we will be protected," Father Profit said.
"This was never about blocking commercial development, but about the protection of sacred spaces."