by Deacon Bill Scholl
My favorite definition of the Catholic Church I learned from Bishop Fulton Sheen, who quoted James Joyce: “Here comes everybody.”
It captures the reality of what it means to be a church sent out to baptize all nations. It urges us to get ready for the Holy Spirit to send us anybody and everybody.
Here at the chancery in Kansas City, Kansas, we are blessed to have the Savior Pastoral and Retreat Center which allows us to offer Catholic events, programs and worship for anybody and everybody from all over the archdiocese.
But there is one kind of body we aren’t so great at serving: the body that struggles with stairs. Some of these bodies use wheelchairs, some of these bodies use canes, and to the degree that we aren’t accessible to them, to that degree we aren’t Catholic.
We have an opportunity to take a major step toward overcoming our steps this Giving Tuesday, with the special-needs ministry, Give Us a Lift campaign.
Give Us a Lift is a campaign that will help people with mobility challenges get around the main parts of Savior Pastoral Center by installing wheelchair lifts on the stairs. Josh Ruoff, the archdiocesan consultant for special needs, and I came up with this idea during an ad hoc meeting shortly after I dropped Josh in his wheelchair trying to carry him up some stairs.
The minutes of the meeting read: “OK, yeah, we probably should get a team together to get some wheelchair lifts installed.” That team has figured out that if on Giving Tuesday we can raise $18,500 to install a lift from the main floor to the dining hall, there are donors ready to commit to helping us with lifts for the rest of the building.
While there are many good Giving Tuesday gift projects in the archdiocese, I would personally ask that you make a gift to the special-needs’ Give Us a Lift project to make Savior more accessible.
Savior is the primary event space for all the ministries of the archdiocese, and so it impacts us all. If we are truly to be a church for everybody, we must become more welcoming to wheelchaired bodies.
To make a gift, go online to: IGiveCatholic.org, select the partner “Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas”, and choose the Special-Needs Ministry. So this Giving Tuesday, please make a gift to help Savior become more Catholic by donating to the Give Us a Lift Campaign.
