For years, cows have been giving of themselves to help mend a local Catholic church on the Southwest Side through an annual cow pie drop.
Proceeds from the event - a raffle where the winner holds the number on which the cow defecates - have gone toward restoration of the church choir loft, repairs of the parish gymnasium and installing the cameras in the church that became vital during pandemic.
“Thanks to the cow, we get to do some great projects,” said Steve Zacik, who organizes it for the church, St. Faustina Kowalska.
In its 17th year, the goal is to raise enough funds to repair the steel beams of the facade of the church building of the 68-year-old parish in Garfield Ridge.
The event will start 2 p.m. Saturday at 5149 S. McVicker Ave., where a parish parking lot will be divided into 700 20-by-20 inch squares, each with a number corresponding to a raffle ticket.
If all 700 tickets are sold, then the holder of the chosen plot will take home $5,000; holders of the eight surrounding squares - called the “splatter” - will take home $350; and the remaining $9,700 will go to funding this year’s project.
Tickets cost $25 and can be bought at the parish rectory beforehand or at the event. Around 200 hundred tickets remain unsold, organizers said.
To ensure absolute fairness, they use a randomizing software to create the order of the grid then run the program a few times to get a range of possibilities and finally have a priest roll a dice to determine which configuration to use.
On the day of the event, the cow is plied with hay and water to ensure that what needs to happen, happens.
Spectators line the grid with lawn chairs and the cow is walked around it by a handler then let go to “do its duty,” Zacik said.
What comes next “all depends on the cow,” said Jerry Soukal, another organizer, although they tend to go for smaller, younger cows after one large cow spent almost 40 minutes napping before getting to it.
Over the years, winners have come from inside and outside the parish community, but organizers welcome all.
Michael Loria is a staff reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times via Report for America, a not-for-profit journalism program that aims to bolster the paper’s coverage of communities on the South and West sides.
