If the Christmas cookies are about to hit the fan, Missouri’s nature centers could be a great way to prevent a holiday meltdown.

The centers are known for showcasing Missouri’s rich natural resources. The hiking trails could help families take a deep breath of fresh air and appreciate the sunshine. A stretch of water capturing reflections of wildflowers blowing in the wind could provide a chance to reset after a stressful day.

On the inside, there might be live animal exhibits, indoor aquariums, and hands-on activities. A host of classes are offered to teach you about anything from soap making, embroidery, and woodcarving, to owls, foxes, and the slithery world of snakes.

Margie Vandeven, the Missouri Department of Conservation’s new education branch chief, said the nature centers are a great place to unwind.

“What a great thing to do on your way home after having a relatively frantic day at the office, or maybe a busy time with your children, and they might be a little sugared up. Get outside and have them play,” she told Missourinet.

Vandeven said you’ll be amazed at the calming effects that nature can have on us.

“We’ve been hearing more and more about the mental health needs that we’re all experiencing right now for a lot of different reasons,” she said. “Nature is just an amazing place to be and helps students in ways that I don’t know that we’re always thinking about, unless we are very strategic in making sure that we’re providing those kinds of opportunities for our kids.”

Missouri’s nature centers are in Cape Girardeau, Jefferson City, Joplin, Springfield, Winona, Lebanon, and the St. Louis and Kansas City areas.

A new Missouri Department of Conservation education center is opening Thursday in Branson. The Shepherd of the Hills Conservation Education Center includes room for two classrooms, a 7,500 gallon indoor aquarium, and new exhibits. It is adjacent to the department’s fish hatchery, where one million trout are raised each year.

The state also has about 100 parks and historic sites to help you reset.

Vandeven, who previously served as the state education commissioner, is now devoting her days to bringing nature into the classroom. Since 2009, more than 1,000 Missouri classrooms have been participating in the Missouri Department of Conservation’s “Discover Nature Schools” program.

The nature schooling curriculum is available to K-12 classrooms and covers a variety of topics, such as wildlife, kayaking, fishing, and the different ecosystems. The teacher and student guides are free and can be ordered through the department’s teacher portal.

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A Missouri priest claims that when he stole $300,000 from parish coffers, it was to hide the money from his diocese, in bank accounts belonging to himself and his sister.

With Fr. Ignazio Medina set to be sentenced Wednesday in federal court, his attorneys told a judge last week that the priest took money from his parish accounts in order to keep it from diocesan oversight and assessment, and that he should not face prison time.

Prosecutors have questioned the priest’s credibility — noting that he was found guilty in a canonical penal process of sexually soliciting a penitent in the confessional — and urged that Medina, 73, should be sentenced to 18 months in prison.

And an expert on parish finances has raised questions about Medina’s newly claimed reason for stealing from St. Stanislaus Parish of Wardsville, Missouri, where he was pastor from 2013 until 2021.

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In a plea agreement signed in July, Medina admitted to a federal judge that he had taken $300,000 from a parish bank account.

The account in question had been for years untracked — unreported to the Diocese of Jefferson City, or included on parish balance sheets.

While the account was discovered by diocesan authorities in 2018, and put into parish financial records, Medina took money from the account in June 2021, shortly before he was transferred from St. Stanislaus to a different Jefferson City parish.

In that month, the priest wrote two checks from the account — one to his sister, for $100,000, and another to himself, for $200,000.

The checks were discovered by parish leaders soon after, and the Jefferson City diocese contacted federal law enforcement officials.

Medina initially told investigators that the money did not belong to the parish — that it was given to him personally by parishioners. He also claimed that his sister had given him $100,000, and that he was writing a check to refund the money.

But that story soon fell apart.

Medina’s sister told investigators that she had never given him the money, and that when her brother wrote her a big check from a parish account, he said it was meant to help care for their mother. Parish donors told investigators that they had not given Medina money personally, and that donations they had made to St. Stanislaus Parish were meant for the parish, and not for the priest personally.

While Medina’s July plea agreement meant he did not go to trial, he did present a new story to a federal judge last week, as his attorneys argued for a sentence of house arrest.

In a sentencing memo, Medina’s lawyer argued that the priest “made a bad decision relating to parish finances,” but that he had not done so to enrich himself. Instead, lawyers said that Medina’s theft “stemmed from his desire to keep St. Stanislaus Parish donations to fund St. Stanislaus Parish specific projects.”

“He did it because he was concerned that the money in the St. Stanislaus Parish account would be used according to the directives of the diocese rather than according to the desires and needs of the parish,” his sentencing memo wrote. “He should have voiced his concerns to the diocese and used its internal processes to try to achieve the same aims.”

The defense memo did not address Medina’s initial claims that the money was given to him — in part by his sister — and not to the parish. Nor did it address $20,000 in cash withdrawals from parish accounts during Medina’s tenure at St/ Stanislaus parish.

But the Diocese of Jefferson City told The Pillar Monday that Medina’s claim was a “troubling statement” and “inconsistent with the reasons previously cited for the misuse of funds.”

For its part, Medina’s memo focused on the priest’s apparent contrition.

“He knows that he should not have taken the money in question and does not seek to justify those actions, but does want to explain that he was not funding a drug habit, financing a broad criminal enterprise, or paying off gambling debt with this money. His desire was to benefit his most recent parish,” Medina’s attorney said.

But in their own Dec. 4 memo, prosecutors in the case called Medina’s “particularly egregious,” and lamented the priest’s “greed in the face of … trust.”

Arguing for 18 months incarceration, prosecutors noted that Medina “stole from people whom he had known and pastored for years – people who dug into their own pockets and provided their own hard-earned money to support the needs and religious mission of their place of worship.”

“As a priest, he had an unparalleled amount of trust placed in him, both financially and morally,” prosecutors noted. “But this trust served to shield his wrongdoing from detection.”

“Even when his side account at Legends Bank first came to light [in 2018], the parish and diocese apparently continued to assume his honesty, concluding that they did not believe any ‘intentional wrongdoing’ had occurred. Other irregularities, such as missing cash bonuses at the parish school, similarly went unresolved because no one suspected the parish priest was the thief in their midst.”

Prosecutors added that “while the defendant does not have any prior criminal history, his current offense, as well as his recent church adjudication for soliciting sex during the sacrament of reconciliation, demonstrate that laws – whether criminal, ecclesiastical, or moral – do not adequately constrain his conduct. He is therefore a recidivism risk, despite his lack of prior criminal history, and this warrants a sentence of incarceration.”

“While the known loss in this case is correctly calculated at $320,000, it is impossible to know the true extent of his conduct, because the trust placed in him was so great.”

A spokesman for the Diocese of Jefferson City told The Pillar on Monday that Medina was found guilty in April 2023 in a canonical penal proceeding which concluded that he had abused his ecclesiastical office by taking parish money.

In January 2024, the diocese announced that the priest had also been found guilty of soliciting sex in the confessional, a “reserved delict” in the Church, whose adjudication is overseen by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Medina is prohibited from hearing confessions, from holding ecclesiastical office, and from publicly celebrating Mass without the permission of Jefferson City’s Bishop Shawn McKnight.

McKnight, 56, could soon find himself facing a new raft of complex parish financial issues, as the bishop is reportedly in consideration for an appointment to lead one of several U.S. archdioceses, among them either the Archdiocese of Omaha, or the Archdiocese of Washington, which is facing a multi-million dollar operational deficit.

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Robert Warren — a retired IRS investigator and professor of accounting at Radford University, has conducted extensive research on priests who steal — told The Pillar that he believes Medina’s most recent claim, that “he maintained a secret parish bank account, and then drained that bank account through disbursements to both himself and his sister, because he was actually trying to save the money for the parish” — “fails the test of logic.”

Warren especially argued that if Medina had intended money sent to himself and his sister to be used for parish expenses, he would have informed his sister of that fact, while her interview with police would appear to indicate otherwise. Further, Warren said, “the record does not reflect that Father Medina made any provisions that upon his death, or the death of his sister, that the funds would be repatriated to the parish.”

Warren noted that Medina is not the first priest to steal from an off-the-books parish bank account claimed to exist to avoid diocesan detection.

In 2012, Bridgeport priest Fr. Michael Moynihan was sent to prison, after he stole hundreds of thousands from an unaudited bank account at St. Michael the Archangel Parish in Greenwich, Connecticut. The account was reportedly opened by Moynihan’s predecessor at the parish, who reportedly opened it to maintain funds that were not audited or taxed by his diocese.

In 2015, a Michigan priest, Fr. Ed Belczak, was sent to prison for stealing $573,000 from his parish, including $420,000 which had been deposited into an undisclosed and unaudited parish bank account, seemingly to avoid archdiocesan detection.

“Based on my research, I think it used to be a common practice for pastors to maintain secret, or off-the-books bank accounts in the name of the parish for which the pastor used as a discretionary fund,” Warren told The Pillar.

Acknowledging that such practices may still exist in some places — and that Medina’s off-the-books account was in operation until relatively recently, Warren said that in his view, “these types of accounts are unethical, immoral, and I’m sure in most cases, illegal. Parishioners, auditors, and the chancery should have access to complete, reliable, accurate, relevant, and timely financial information. To do otherwise is a disservice to all those just mentioned.”

Medina’s attorney has not responded to The Pillar’s request for comment.

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ST. LOUIS — Missouri ‘s status as one of the most active death penalty states is about to change for one simple reason: The state is running out of inmates to execute.

The lethal injection of Christopher Collings on Dec. 3 left just eight men on death row — a figurative term since condemned Missouri inmates are housed with other prisoners. By contrast, nearly 100 people were living with a death sentence three decades ago.

Three of the eight Missouri inmates will almost certainly live out their lives in prison after being declared mentally incompetent for execution. Court appeals continue for the other five, and no new executions are scheduled.

Missouri isn’t alone. Across the nation, the number of people awaiting the ultimate punishment has declined sharply since the turn of the century.

“We are in a very, very different place than we were 25 years ago ,and that’s for very good reasons,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit that doesn’t take a posi­tion on the death penal­ty but is crit­i­cal of prob­lems in its application.

The Legal Defense Fund’s Death Row USA report showed 2,180 people with pending death sentences this year, down from 3,682 in 2000. Missouri’s peak year was 1997, when 96 people were on death row.

After reaching a height of 98 U.S. executions in 1999, the annual number hasn’t topped 30 since 2014. So far this year, 23 executions have been carried out — six in Alabama, five in Texas, four in Missouri, three in Oklahoma, two in South Carolina and one each in Georgia, Utah and Florida. Two more are scheduled: Wednesday in Indiana and Thursday in Oklahoma.

Use of the death penalty has declined in part because many states have turned away from it. Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia have abolished the punishment, and five others have moratoriums.

Even in active death penalty states, prosecutors in murder cases are far more inclined to seek life in prison without parole.

In the 1990s, the nation was typically seeing over 300 new death sentences each year. By contrast, 21 people were sentenced to death nationwide in 2023.

A major factor is the cost. At trial, additional experts are often brought in, cases tend to run longer, and a separate hearing is required in the penalty phase, Maher said.

Costs don’t end with the prosecution. Court appeals often drag on for decades, running up huge legal bills incurred by public entities — prosecutors, attorneys general, public defenders. Sixteen of this year’s 23 executions involved inmates incarcerated 20 years or more.

“Millions and millions of dollars are being used — those are taxpayer dollars — for a system that by and large the American public has concluded is not keeping them safer,” Maher said.

Court rulings have resulted in fewer death sentences, too, including Supreme Court decisions barring execution of the mentally disabled and those who were minors at the time of their crimes, Maher said.

Views of capital punishment also have changed. A Gallup poll last year found 50% of Americans believed capital punishment was applied unfairly, compared to 47% who believed it was fairly implemented. This was the highest such number since Gallup first began asking about the fairness of the death penalty’s application in 2000.

Still, there are indications of new support for the death penalty in some places.

Two executions in South Carolina were the first in that state since 2011. Utah carried out its first execution in 14 years. Idaho tried to execute Thomas Eugene Creech in February — the state’s first since 2012 — but corrections department workers couldn’t find a viable vein to deliver the lethal drug. The execution in Indiana this week would be the first in 15 years.

Meanwhile, incoming President Donald Trump, who restarted federal executions, with 13 carried out in his first term, has suggested he’ll use the death penalty again.

“If President Trump and other elected officials are paying attention to what public support is telling them, they will be more reluctant to use the death penalty going forward,” Maher said.

Some of the most aggressive prosecutors pursuing the death penalty are in California, even though Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom placed a moratorium on its use.

San Bernardino County District Attorney Jason Anderson’s office has successfully prosecuted four death penalty cases since he took office six years ago, including one last week: Jerome Rogers was sentenced to death for robbing and killing two elderly women.

Anderson said some crimes are so heinous that the death penalty “is appropriate to pursue.”

“When you sit in a courtroom and you see the anguish of the victim’s surviving family members, they certainly aren’t concerned about their tax dollars going to pursue what we think is a different level of evil in a death penalty case,” Anderson said.

He noted that the four death penalty cases he prosecuted involved the killings of a combined 12 victims.

“How do you put a price tag on 12 dead people?” Anderson asked.