Help us make the Pastoral Center more accessible this Giving Tuesday

by Deacon Bill Scholl

I learned my favorite definition of the Catholic Church from Bishop Fulton Sheen, who quoted James Joyce: “Here comes everyone.”

It captures the reality of what it means to be a church sent out to baptize all Nations. It urges us to prepare for the Holy Spirit to send us all and sundry.

Here at the Chancery in Kansas City, Kansas, we are fortunate to have the Savior Pastoral and Retreat Center, which allows us to offer Catholic events, programs and worship services to anyone and everyone throughout the Archdiocese.

But there is one type of body that we are not so good at using: the body that has difficulty navigating stairs. Some of these bodies use wheelchairs, others use canes, and to the extent that we are not accessible to them, we are not Catholic.

This Giving Tuesday, we have the opportunity to take a big step toward overcoming our problems with the Department of Special Relief’s Give Us a Lift campaign.

“Give Us a Lift” is a campaign to help people with limited mobility get around the main areas of the Savior Pastoral Center by installing wheelchair lifts on the stairs. Archdiocesan Special Needs Counselor Josh Ruoff and I came up with this idea during an ad hoc meeting shortly after I dropped Josh off in his wheelchair as I tried to carry him up a flight of stairs.

The minutes of the meeting say, “OK, yeah, we should probably get a team together to install a couple of wheelchair lifts.” This team figured out that if we raised $18,500 on Giving Tuesday to install a lift from There are donors who are willing to support us with elevators for the rest of the building.

Although there are many good Giving Tuesday fundraising projects in the Archdiocese, I would personally like to ask you to consider making a donation to the Give Us a Lift project for people with special needs to make Savior more accessible.

Savior is the primary venue for all archdiocesan ministries and therefore impacts us all. If we truly want to be a church for all, we must be more welcoming to wheelchair accessible people.

To make a donation, go online to: IGiveCatholic.org, select the partner “Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas” and then select Special-Needs Ministry. So this Giving Tuesday, make a donation to help Savior become more Catholic by donating to the Give Us a Lift campaign.