I wanted to find a way to honor God, faith, and my love of nature. The St. Kateri Habitats and Parks program showed me a way to do it. Anyone can change their yard, parish landscaping or fields into a healthy habitat for people and wildlife. It can be as easy as planting an herb garden, or flowers and shrubs for bees and butterflies. The St. Kateri Habitats and Parks program is sponsored by the St. Kateri Conservation Center.
The St. Kateri Habitats program helps us to see the land as a spiritual place, which fosters and strengthens our spirituality. Religious expression in a St. Kateri Habitat could include signs, statues of Mary, your favorite saint, saints who loved animals, birds and nature, angels, crosses and shrines. It could include walkways or paths for meditation and benches to sit quietly in prayer or contemplation.
Please click here to register your habitat and join the St. Kateri Habitat community.
Saint Kateri Tekakwitha is the first American Indian to be canonized by the Catholic Church. She was a Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) born in what is now New York State. St. Kateri is the patron saint of the environment and integral ecology.
In his book, Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather, Peter J. Thuesen compares tornados, windstorms, and other especially violent weather events to human conceptions about God, punishment, and gratitude for coming through them. “Tornadoes, and weather generally,” he writes, put us in touch with the origin of religions, which arose in part as humans struggled to account for the forces of nature.” Thuesen explains that God and weather are unknowable and have uncontrollable power, so it is not surprising to see that the two tied together in the human psyche.
One night in August 1683, a tornado hit the Jesuit mission at Sault St. Louis, (the Mohawk village of Kahnawake) in Quebec, Canada. “All the monsters of hell” were unleashed against the mission in the form of a “whirlwind” which destroyed the chapel. Miraculously, Fr. Claude Chauchetiere and two other Jesuits who were in the chapel at the time of the tornado survived without serious injury.
Fr. Chauchetiere credited their deliverance to Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk convert to Christianity. Earlier in the day each of the men had prayed at her grave nearby. They attributed their prayers at the site for their salvation from the tornado. Surviving the destructive tornado was the second miracle Chauchetiere attributed to Kateri Tekakwitha. Three years earlier an oak tree next to the chapel had been struck by lightening but the chapel was left untouched. 
Fr. Claude Chauchetiere (September 7, 1645-April 17, 1709) was a French Jesuit missionary priest and painter. He met Kateri Tekakwitha at Kahnawake a year or so before her death. His oil painting of her hangs in the sacristy of St. Francis Xavier Church on the Kanawake Mohawk Reserve near Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
