"10 Things in Your Home Linked to Climate Change" is a resource from Catholic Relief Services on simple ways your house could be contributing to climate change. The resource offers facts on 10 simple things, such as fish and coffee, that can have major impacts on the environment.
Roman Catholic Cardinal Peter Turkson spoke at Mershon Auditorium at The Ohio State University in 2015. The proceeds from his talk with OSU President Michael Drake were used as matching funds in a grant from the Initiative for Food and Agricultural Transformation (InFACT) discovery theme program. The proceeds funded an agricultural exchange between Accra, Ghana, and Columbus, Ohio.
Brother Paul Kennedy, a member of the Dominican Order, grew up in Cincinnati with a dream of running a restaurant. Today, he is fulfilling that dream in an unexpected way. Every weekday, he is in charge of feeding the physical and spiritual hunger of more than 300 people at the Holy Family Soup Kitchen in Columbus. Brother Paul offers that, “What always was important to me about the restaurant business was the chance to communicate with people as much as the chance to feed them. But regardless of what I did, every job I’ve had in the past was focused on service to people. Here at the soup kitchen, I get the chance to do the kind of work I wanted to while growing up, while at the same time getting to know the people we serve and developing a rapport with them.”
St. Anthony Parish in Cincinnati, Ohio has starting their own recycling program. One of the parishioners had recently discovered that nearly 50% of all trash could be diverted by being recycled or composted. Their creation care committee launched the Beyond the Bin program by installing a 96-gallon bin in an alcove near the rectory. Word spread through the congregation, parishioners have started to bringing in their own recycling, and the program has been embraced by the entire church community.
With the release of Laudato Si’ and the visitation of Pope Francis to the United States, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of both Americans and Catholic Americans who have demonstrated concern over Climate Change. Individuals of various faiths have expressed more trust the Pope due to the overwhelmingly positive reception of his message.
A New Work of Mercy: Care for our Common Home is an article from The Catholic Times that focuses on caring for our Earth from a global perspective. The following paragraph sums up Pope Francis's reasoning, in part, for introducing World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation:
"Until the last few hundred years, most people had a local sphere of influence. It was sufficient to love your immediate neighbor as yourself. But in our globalized economy, we participate in systems that affect our brothers and sisters in the farthest reaches of the planet, most of whom we will never meet. Pope Francis points out the ecological debt between the global north and south caused by 'the disproportionate use of natural resources by certain countries' (LS 51). In proposing care for our common home as a work of mercy, he is inviting us to expand our concept of neighbor yet again."