Not long after the November elections Eugie Farias set out to find out where all the “pray” signs around town were coming from, sharing with a friend, “wouldn’t it be awesome if we could just replace all these election signs with prayer placards and adorn our city with a message.”
Soon it was her birthday week, and on the actual day she came home to find one of the signs in her front yard.
“I got goose bumps, I was so elated. Who knew that I was looking for these signs,” Farias said over the phone last week. Suspecting her friend Irma Trevino might be behind the gift she gave her a call.
By then Trevino, a member of the Catholic Daughters of the Americas Court No. 2749 through St. Luke’s Catholic Church, had contacted the group president Nellie Garcia and learned the group was selling the placards as a fundraiser.
“I told her the story and within two hours I had reached out to over 50 of my friends to help with their initiative who all were all on board. They said yes. I told Irma to reserve as many of the signs as she could. … So I ended up selling close to 100 signs and I guess originally they were only going to sell 1,000 signs, they weren’t sure what the response was going to be, but they had such a significant response from the people that their members had decided to continue selling signs through the end of the year.”
Garcia said Anna B. Lerma, vice president of the Catholic Daughters of the Americas at St. Luke’s, has grandchildren whose school in Corpus Christi was selling the prayer signs as a fundraiser. The group contacted the school and the vendor.
“We decided that the pray signs would be better than the political signs,” Garcia said. “We got our first batch in November and it went really, really well. We got started right before Thanksgiving.”
She said there might have been more signs than there are, were it not for the pandemic. Then again, there’s word of mouth. One neighbor gets a sign and all the neighbors want one. Garcia said Lettie Marroquin and Irma Trevino are the top promoters of the signs.
The signs are fairly inexpensive at $10 each, which leaves the group room to make a little money, to the point that the St. Lukes group is using the signs to fundraise for Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, the Food Bank of the Rio Grande Valley, and even state and national Catholic Daughters of the Americas organizations.
Garcia said the signs fit in well with the Catholic Daughters’ mission “to participate in the religious, charitable and educational Apostolates of the Church,” and to engage in “creative and spiritual programs which provide its members with the opportunity to develop their God-given talents in meaningful ways that positively influence the welfare of the church and all people throughout the world.”
Explaining how the signs got her attention, Farias said the first time she saw one it gave her goose bumps.
“It’s powerful. You can’t help but just say a prayer. I’m so grateful. It doesn’t matter your denomination or your faith,” she said.
