Laudato Trees: Pope Francis’s encyclical on environment spurs tree planting initiative at parishes and Catholic schools
By Richard Szczepanowski
Catholic Standard
April 21, 2022
When he issued his encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home in 2015, Pope Francis called on people of goodwill – and indeed, “every person living on this planet” – to demonstrate an “environmental responsibility” that would “directly and significantly affect the world around us.”
Laudato Si’ (“Praise be to You”), was published in June of that year and takes its name from St. Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of the Sun” in which the saintly friar praises God through His creation and the gifts of “Brother Sun,” “Sister Moon,” and “our sister Mother Earth.” In the encyclical, the Holy Father stressed the need to respect and protect the “relationship existing between nature and the society which lives in it.”