On a recent drizzly November morning, 70 volunteers and a crew from Casey Trees gathered at The Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Silver Spring, Maryland. Their mission was to plant 58 trees, one of which would be the 1,000th tree planted in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington under the Laudato Trees program.
Volunteers were assigned to a team. All grabbed shovels and in a little more than two hours a barren stretch along Georgia Avenue had been transformed into an arbor of 58 trees.
Volunteers from the archdiocesan Care for Creation Committee launched Laudato Trees in 2020 with the goal of planting 1,000 trees on Catholic properties. The name was inspired by Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, which urges all people of good will to hear “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.”
Phil Downey, a Laudato Trees volunteer said, “In 2020, 1,000 trees seemed a bit crazy, but the folks at Casey Trees and God’s grace enabled us to reach the goal.”
Reaching out to Gate of Heaven was a blessing, said Matthew Stewart, the cemetery’s general manager. After losing federal funds from the Inflation Reduction Act, Casey Trees was able to secure a grant from The Arbor Day Foundation to pay for the tree planting.
