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www.theactiveage.com Kansas’ Largest Newspaper
December 2023
Hidden chapel is 'heart' of hospital
Pastor David Chiles
Church wants senior housing, not money By PJ Griekspoor and Bonita Gooch The Community Voice Pastor David Chiles of Paradise Missionary Baptist Church has a front-row seat to the explosive building spree on Wichita State University’s Innovation Campus and adjacent private property. Corporate offices are being built
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See Housing, page 7
By Joe Stumpe There’s a reason why going from point A to point B in Ascension Via Christi St. Francis hospital can seem like a circuitous process: the Chapel of the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother, which the hospital grew up and around over the decades. “The Sisters were so stubborn, they just refused to demolish the chapel,” joked Roz Hutchinson, marketing and communications manager for Ascension Kansas. “I like to think of it as the heart of the hospital,” added Tracey Biles, chief mission integration officer for Ascension Kansas. The size and impressive features of the chapel tend to take first-time visitors by surprise. As one blogger wrote, she’d always assumed the hospital was a “large cubic mass” until seeing a sign in a hallway for the chapel and discovering it was a standalone structure completely surrounded by wings of the hospital. “One can easily forget one is in a hospital, and the generic (chapel) sign outside seems ludicrously inadequate as an indicator of what’s in here,” she wrote.
The Chapel of the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother as seen from an inner room of Ascension Via Christi St. Francis Hospital. “It’s unusual to have a chapel that’s basically the size of a cathedral in the center of your medical center,” Hutchinson said. The chapel was dedicated on Oct. 15, 1947, at a ceremony attended by more than 300 priests, nuns
and members of the Catholic laity, according to an article in the Wichita Eagle. Bishop Mark K. Carroll left his sick bed to bless the edifice, describing it as “the most beautiful chapel in See Chapel, page 6
Trains run in their families
Museum to restore locomotive No. 93 By Amy Geiszler-Jones Hanging around trains seems to be in Ed Pavey’s blood. No, the Valley City resident didn’t follow his father and grandfather to work for the railroads. Indeed, his father advised against it. “One of the things that Dad always told me was, ‘You can do whatever you want in life, but don’t go to work for them,’” Pavey recalled, noting that his father worked six days a week and found it hard to get consecutive days off. Instead, Pavey has volunteered for Wichita’s Great Plains Transportation
Museum since retiring from a long career in law enforcement in 2018. “If we don’t preserve the history, it’ll be gone,” said Pavey, who spent two decades as a Sedgwick County sheriff ’s deputy and nearly three with the Kansas Law Enforcement Training Center. Pavey is one of about two Photo by Amy Geiszler-Jones dozen active volunteers for the museum, which is located Ed Pavey, left, and Mike Martin volunteer at 700 E. Douglas across from at the Great Plains Transportation See Train, page 7 Museum.
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