The Annual Catholic Appeal supports a wide range of programs and ministries that make Christ’s presence known
Hope isn’t just a word.
It’s a mission that reaches into every corner of the community — lifting hearts, supporting lives and inspiring others in faith. The Annual Catholic Appeal is an opportunity to continue that commitment as “Messengers of Hope,” the theme of this year’s appeal.
The goal of the 2025 campaign is $16 million, and it will be conducted in parishes the weekends of April 26-27, May 3-4 and May 10-11. Approximately 91 cents of every dollar raised goes back to the community in direct services.
Appeal funds go toward safe, stable and affordable housing; support for active and retired priests; adult faith formation and evangelization efforts; Catholic education assisting children with a sense of purpose and value; parish food pantries serving people who are hungry; housing, medical and dental care for uninsured low-income residents in rural areas; programs that teach respect for human life; vocations programs to help youth and young adults discern a vocation to the priesthood or religious life; support for youth ministry; and more.
“The Annual Catholic Appeal is one of the most impactful ways for us to be messengers of hope in our community,” Archbishop Mitchell T. Rozanski said. “I pray that you will join us as we seek to make Christ present throughout the Archdiocese of St. Louis and lead others to Him through life-giving ministries and programs.”
Catholic Renewal Center
About 15 years ago, Julie Leadlove was going through a difficult time in her life. So she turned to prayer.Leadlove attended a parish gathering and met healing and deliverance prayer ministers from the Catholic Renewal Center. Afterward, she was offered a card with information on the center’s activities and was invited to visit.
The healing prayers that she received opened the door to explore how she could intercede for others through prayer. Julie eventually became involved in the healing and deliverance prayer ministry and participates in an intercessory prayer group every Friday at the center in Affton.
“As a group, we ask God to talk to us about how He would like for us to intercede for whatever the focus is that day,” said Julie, a parishioner at St. Anselm in Creve Coeur. Each meeting includes praise and worship and a lesson, which could include a reading from a book or a reflection on the upcoming Sunday Gospel. After some reflection and discussion, the members of the group share individual prayer requests.
Healing and deliverance ministry prayer teams also have a presence at parishes and events throughout the archdiocese, such as the Catholic Men and Women for Christ conferences. Those who seek out the ministry often have difficulty overcoming feelings of negativity, fear, sorrow, anxiety, grief or resentment, even though they understand that their behavior isn’t healthy.
That’s where the prayer ministry can intercede on the person’s behalf. “I say to them, ‘What would you like to ask God for today?’” Julie said. “We are lifting them up to God and surrendering that to God. My prayer partner and I want to be an empty vessel for God to use how He wants. Prayer does literally make a difference.”
Healing and deliverance prayer ministry and the intercessory prayer group are just two of the resources offered by the Catholic Renewal Center, which helps others discover how their spiritual gifts given by the Holy Spirit can be used to build the Church. Other programs include Life in the Spirit seminars, training for parish-based Jonah Prayer Ministry teams, spiritual direction, grief ministry, divorced and separated ministry, abortion healing ministry, spiritual gifts inventory and more.
“What the Catholic Renewal Center offers is a lot of hope to a lot of very hopeless situations for people — a lot of desperate situations, people who are very oppressed or even depressed,” director Jane Guenther said. “The Renewal Center offers hope where other people have not been able to bring hope to them.”
The center has trained about 100 spiritual directors since launching a certification program in 2020 (Julie was part of the first cohort) and offers ongoing growth seminars for them. A special grant from the Annual Catholic Appeal helped launch the program.
“We have to know how to help those disciples stay engaged and to be able to deepen their faith, and spiritual direction is such an essential part of that,” Jane said.
The center also has expanded its ministry to Hispanic Catholics. A core team serves the Hispanic Renewal’s Midwest region covering eight states. Ministry tailored to Hispanic Catholics includes Life in the Spirit seminars, training on catechesis of the Holy Spirit, spiritual gifts inventory and Jonah Team training, among other programs.
The Catholic Renewal Center’s programs offer Catholics the opportunity to deepen their faith, “so that they can live it in a more potent way,” Jane said. “And in living (faith) with that kind of strength, they’re able to evangelize others more successfully.”
Office of Racial Harmony and Black Catholic Ministries
As the archdiocese’s first director of the Office of Racial Harmony and Black Catholic Ministries, Joyce
Jones’ role is to raise awareness of the sin of racism in all its forms and to facilitate conversations and build relationships across racial boundaries. The office serves as a resource to parishes in developing relationships among different ethnicities represented within the archdiocese.
Joyce’s primary work is coordinating and leading workshops on racism with parishes, schools and organizations. After George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis in 2020, Joyce’s phone began ringing off the hook and hasn’t stopped since.
“People are interested in talking about (racism),” she said. “One of the things that I hear all the time when we’re doing these presentations is that I never heard that before.” In presenting on the topic of racism, Joyce said that it’s important to look for a connection with the audience, and that is often found in the Church’s teachings and the Gospels.
Other activities have included working with a local team to implement the national pastoral plan for U.S. Black Catholics set forth by the National Black Catholic Congress; the annual “Forgive Us Our Trespasses” Maafa procession and prayer service; and the Sankofa pilgrimage for high school students to travel to several southern states to learn about slave trade, racial segregation and the Civil Rights Movement. She also has assisted with the archdiocesan Office of Archives and Records in researching the archdiocese’s involvement with the institution of slavery.
Joyce sees the work as creating a space for people of different cultures to come together and to talk about challenging subjects from a perspective of faith. The message is one of love, she stressed, a message that is a central theme in “Open Wide Our Hearts,” the U.S. bishops’ 2018 pastoral letter on racism.
“Everything I’m doing is coming from a place of love,” she said. “So I’m talking to them about if we love each other, then these things that they’re talking about in this letter would not happen.”
St. Charles Lwanga Center
Danielle Harrison has fond memories of the leaders at the St. Charles Lwanga Center, who guided her in faith in her formative years.
Several women at the Lwanga Center, founded in 1978 to serve the African-American Catholic community with spiritual formation and leadership development, encouraged Danielle to develop her role as a lay leader in the Church.
Decades later, she’s been tapped to serve as manager of the center, which now falls under the umbrella of the archdiocesan Office of Racial Harmony and Black Catholic Ministries. Danielle described it as a full-circle moment.
“To be here and say, OK, Lwanga made me who I am, and so now how can I help carry that vision?” Harrison said.
The center’s founders recognized the importance of having a space where Black Catholics could preserve their cultural experience of faith. Activities have included pastoral care, prayer ministry, Bible studies and youth ministry activities, as well as annual events, including the Mass commemorating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Model of Justice Awards program and the Lwanga Center’s Testimonial Dinner and Celebration.
The center moved to St. Rita Church in Vinita Park in December with an eye on expanding ways in which the center interacts with parishes in the three vicariates of the archdiocese. A fine arts program will be launched in the spring, offering piano and vocal lessons, liturgical dance and African drumming to preserve Black worship styles. Other new programs in the works include a healing ministry and scholarships for Black Catholic studies.
“We’re looking toward the goal of offering quality formation and education, not only to Black Catholics in the archdiocese, but people who want to know about Black Catholic spirituality,” Danielle said, adding that Sister Thea Bowman often said “I’m authentically Black and truly Catholic. So they’re not diametrically opposed, but that it enhances our worship — Catholic and universal. This is a space that encourages us to build that part of our culture that can contribute to the universal Church.”
St. Joseph Housing Initiative
For La Kesha Dean, home is where the couch is.
After years of moving through homelessness, a run-down apartment and her mother’s house, La Kesha and her two daughters moved into their own home in the Baden neighborhood of north St. Louis in December.
They purchased the house through the St. Joseph Housing Initiative, a faith-based nonprofit that produces housing for low- and moderate-income families in the St. Louis area. SJHI has receiving funding from the Annual Catholic Appeal’s Affordable Housing Fund.
As La Kesha settled into her new family home, SJHI connected her with nonprofit Home Sweet Home to pick out furniture.
“I got a couch, and I haven’t had one in a really long time — it’s probably been since 2012 that I have not had a couch,” she said. “And I know that seems small and weird, but we like to hang out. We like to sit down and cuddle, and it’s a big deal to have a couch.”
There was some anxiety that came with the home-buying process, La Kesha said; taking out a mortgage is no small decision. “So it really helped that St. Joseph (Housing Initiative) was willing to basically hold my hand the entire way. They were available and very helpful to answer any question. I didn’t feel like I was alone … it was like we were really a team trying to get my family into this home.”
La Kesha’s home is one of three houses on the same street in Baden that SJHI purchased as vacant properties and renovated into ready-to-move-in homes. This was the housing initiative’s first expansion into the north St. Louis area, which had been a goal since the nonprofit’s founding, executive director Christy McCutcheon said.
“We knew that just choosing a house somewhere in north city and renovating one house and selling it really wasn’t going to have the impact that we were looking for. So we found these three properties in Baden on Annetta,” she said.
The housing initiative did a complete gut renovation on all three houses, working for a little more than a year to build them back up from the studs, installing new electric, new sewer laterals, new flooring, new fixtures and appliances and more. By early March, all three homes had been sold to new homeowners.
In tandem with the home renovations, St. Joseph Housing Initiative also started offering its Homeowner Readiness Academy, a free homebuyer education program, in north city. The initiative also brought to the northside its First Neighbors program, which pairs a new homeowner with a mentor of sorts in the neighborhood.
In addition to the Baden properties, St. Joseph Housing Initiative has renovated and sold 13 houses in the Dutchtown and Carondelet area of south St. Louis, with more projects underway.
“The more homes that we’re getting close together, the larger the impact we’re having in the community,” Christy said. “Our neighbors in Dutchtown report that the blocks are changing, and people care about their properties; there’s flowers going out on the porches, and those types of things are happening as we do more homes on a block and put homeowners in those homes.”
And moving forward, the St. Joseph Housing Initiative plans to continue expanding its work in north city as well as the southside, Christy said.
“The faith in our mission and the generosity of the donors are what made these three projects possible for us,” she said, “and because of the success of these three projects, we remain committed to Baden and remain with our eyes open, looking for additional properties to renovate in north city.”
How to donate
The financial goal of the 2025 Annual Catholic Appeal is $16 million. Approximately 91 cents of every dollar goes back into the community in the form of direct services. The appeal will be conducted in parishes the weekends of April 26-27, May 3-4 and May 10-11. To learn more about the Annual Catholic Appeal, visit aca.archstl.org.
SERVING OUR PARISHES DIRECTLY $2,915,000
Elementary School Assistance $2,000,000
Stewardship and Development Support for Parishes, Schools and Agencies $425,000
Office of Peace and Justice $140,000
Parish Emergency Assistance Fund $100,000
Parish Food Pantries $100,000
Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis $100,000
Basilica of St. Louis, King of France $50,000
SERVING OUR YOUTH $3,437,000
Archdiocesan and Parochial High Schools $1,480,000
Archdiocesan Seminary $450,000
Vocation Programs $300,000
Newman Centers on College Campuses $272,000
One Classroom $250,000
Religious Formation $200,000
Special Education $200,000
Today and Tomorrow Educational Fund $150,000
High School Stewardship Essay Program $75,000
Office of Youth Ministry $60,000
SERVING THE PEOPLE IN OUR PARISHES $2,128,000
Respect Life Apostolate $450,000
Evangelization and Discipleship $400,000
Adult Faith Formation $370,000
Natural Family Planning $221,000
Hispanic Ministry $215,000
Office of Racial Harmony $130,000
Catholic Deaf Ministry $112,000
Catholic Renewal Center $85,000
Catholic St. Louis Magazine $80,000
Elementary Teachers Educational Fund $40,000
St. Charles Lwanga Center $25,000
SERVING THOSE IN NEED $3,035,000
Catholic Charities $1,650,000
Affordable Housing Fund $500,000
Rural Parish Clinic $360,000
Sts. Joachim and Ann Care Service $165,000
Criminal Justice Ministry $75,000
Immigrant and Refugee Ministry $60,000
Bridge of Hope Lincoln County $60,000
The Wellston Center $60,000
Archbishop’s Charity Fund $50,000
Meals Program at Sts. Peter and Paul Church $30,000
Messengers of Peace Mission Work $25,000
SERVING THOSE WHO SERVE US $1,545,000
Care for Active and Retired Priests $750,000
Regina Cleri Priests Retirement Home $370,000
Continuing Formation for Priests $200,000
Permanent Diaconate $150,000
Support for Religious Orders $75,000
OTHER $2,940,000
Annual Catholic Appeal Expenses $1,500,000
Reserve for Unpaid Pledges $960,000
Archdiocesan Services $480,000
None of the money raised by the Annual Catholic Appeal is used to defend or settle criminal or civil lawsuits related to the clergy abuse scandal.
