St. Cletus Parish grounds earn recognition from Catholic conservation center
Down the path behind St. Cletus Church, through a tall green trellis, Jeanie and Jim McCoy tend to God’s creation.
Together, they take care of the trees, flowers and native plants of the parish’s meditation garden, weeding and watering their way around the greenery that surrounds a statue of St. Rose Philippine Duchesne and several benches. As birds flock to the birdhouses and butterflies flit to the milkweed, the couple finds quiet time with Jesus.
“I feel like I do my prayer out here while I’m weeding,” Jeanie McCoy said.
The McCoys are chairs of the parish’s St. Dorothy Society garden group, a large team that cares for the gardens and mows the grass on the parish grounds. This spring, the grounds of St. Cletus were recognized as a certified Saint Kateri Habitat by the Saint Kateri Conservation Center.
The Saint Kateri Conservation Center is a Catholic nonprofit founded in 2000 to inspire Catholics and all people to create and restore healthy habitats for people and wildlife, beginning at home and in local communities. It’s named for St. Kateri Tekakwitha, a young woman of the Mohawk tribe who was baptized into the Church at age 19. She is the patron of Native Americans and ecology and the environment.
To earn certification as a Saint Kateri Habitat, landscapes must include at least two of five specific elements and have some form of religious expression. St. Cletus’ grounds qualified by including food, water and space for wildlife; native trees, flowers and shrubs; practices of gardening for pollination (bees and butterflies); sacred space for prayer and contemplation; and expressions of faith.
Earning the certification was a joint project of the St. Dorothy gardeners and the parish Peace and Justice Ministry. Care for creation is one of the seven themes of Catholic Social Teaching, noted Pam Brown, a member of the Peace and Justice Ministry.
“What we can do better to care for creation and be better stewards of God’s gift of the earth, especially here at St. Cletus, lights a fire in me,” she said.
The Peace and Justice Ministry was looking for more ways to collaborate with other groups, so when Brown came across information about Saint Kateri Habitats, she shared the information with the St. Dorothy garden group. The parish grounds met nearly all the habitat criteria already, and the ministries worked together to add more native and pollinator-friendly plants in various areas of the gardens this spring.
In addition to bigger areas like the meditation garden, the parish grounds are also dotted with locuses of natural beauty nearly everywhere you look: large potted flowers in front of the church and chapel, brick planters along the church steps, a plot of native plants where a tree had to be removed, blooms surrounding the church sign near the road. A new pet memorial garden offers a space to place decorated rocks in memory of deceased pets, a companion to the blessing of the pets celebrated on the feast of St. Francis of Assisi each year.
The plan for the parish grounds was originally created in consultation with the Missouri Botanical Garden, and the St. Dorothy gardeners have added and adapted over the years, said Jeanie McCoy, who with Jim has been involved in the group since the 1980s. The gardeners divide up the work, each responsible for a plot or area. They’ve also worked with Girl Scout and Boy Scout troops on various projects and education over the years.
“You learn as you go every year, certain flowers work, certain things don’t, some things get eaten by the deer,” McCoy said.
“I’m a very introverted person. I’m not the type that wants to get up in church and do the lectoring or any of that,” she added. “And I think everyone has their own abilities, and so this is something I can do for the Church, together with my husband.”
The gardens offer a welcoming place for parishioners and visitors alike to take quiet time with God, McCoy said. Bible study groups occasionally meet in the meditation garden, and the gardeners added a “book box” next to the statue of St. Philippine Duchesne with a small lending library of spiritual reading available.
“We have a lot of people who just walk their dogs through, so I hope that maybe that would entice them to stop and read and pick up a book and take it home,” she said.
She hopes that the beauty of the gardens help people find God both inside and outside the church buildings.
“I think that a church is more welcoming when it’s pretty outside, not just inside,” she said. “…I think that if you ask any of the gardeners, they would say the same thing: They enjoy doing it to make people happy. The parishioners appreciate the beauty of their church.”
