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Taking the pope's message to Sacred Heart Parish

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Sister Lynn Caton, a pastoral associate in charge of social ministries at Sacred Heart Parish in North Merrick, began a garden for the first time this summer. It’s a small patch of greenery under her office window, with a handful of bushy tomato plants and soaring sunflowers. There’s also a bird feeder and a clear-plastic cross. She calls it her little “corner of heaven.”

She started the garden, she said, in part to beautify the space in front of her office and in part to see what it’s like to grow her own food.

Caton said she was inspired to create the garden largely by Pope Francis’s recent encyclical on the environment, “Laudato Si,’” or “On Care for Our Common Home,” a 180-page treatise calling on people around the world to abandon the “throwaway” model of consumer culture and embrace a new ideology that respects the environment.

In particular, the pontiff addressed climate change, the heating of the Earth caused by ever-accumulating levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane from power plants, factories and vehicles. Climate change, scientists at the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say, could have dire consequences for humanity, including ever-stronger hurricanes and typhoons and rapidly rising seas.

An act as simple as growing a backyard garden can help reduce greenhouse-gas emissions because, scientists say, transportation is not required to move the food from garden to table, only a pair of willing hands. Therefore, there are no emissions involved.

“We are responsible to take care of the Earth, which is taking care of people,” Caton said. “Just one person choosing to recycle aluminum will make a difference.”

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