In 1935, Babe Ruth retired from baseball, Franklin Roosevelt was serving the first term of his presidency, and 5-year-old Stella Davis received her first Communion.
“I would cry as I walked up the aisle with my mother to receive Communion,” said Davis, who has vivid memories of what happened 90 years ago in El Paso, Texas. “The priest asked my mother, ‘What’s wrong with Stella? Why does she cry every time she comes up here?’ And my mother said, ‘Because she wants to receive the Eucharist, Father.’ ”
When he asked little Stella if she knew what the Eucharist was, she told the priest it was the true body and blood of Christ. The priest looked at her mother and said, “Dress her up, bring her next Sunday, and she’ll make her first Communion.”
She’s been in a hurry ever since to tell people about the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, and the power of the Holy Spirit. From the moment of her first Communion, she said she began to “pray in the spirit.”
“It’s a prayer language that the Holy Spirit gave to me,” said Davis, who is celebrating the 50-year anniversary of “Christian Women in Action,” an international charismatic prayer group she founded and hosts every week at her Alexandria home. “Jesus sent us the Holy Spirit and it is here until Jesus comes back again, so it is the Holy Spirit working in us, and we’re using the gifts of the Holy Spirit.”
Every Monday for the past 50 years, Davis is joined by longtime local women of CWIA, along with others on Zoom from Colombia, Denmark, the Philippines and beyond, to pray for each other and for the salvation of souls.
Rosalie Mainey has been a devoted member for 39 years. “We don’t seem to run into jealousy like a lot of other groups do,” said Mainey. “Oh my goodness, people come to us. The downtrodden come to us, and once they get prayed for, they keep coming back because they’re getting fed spiritually.”
Connie Williamson was a skeptic when she began attending CWIA meetings in 1988. She wasn’t comfortable being around people who prayed in tongues and lifted their hands in prayer. “I had no idea what it all meant,” she said. But Williamson agreed to let others “lay hands” on her after she asked for prayer. “Immediately, I was slain in the spirit,” she said. “My hands went up by themselves praising the Lord. I had nothing to do with that. I always had a real problem with people raising their hands and thought it was rather fake.”
Davis has many supernatural stories to share and she still travels internationally to do it. “(God) wants us to evangelize, and many people in the Catholic Church have not been evangelized,” she said. “I teach how the Holy Spirit works in our life. I teach how he helps us, and I teach that we are not just going to church. We must put into action what we receive at the church.”
Davis recently returned from her fourth trip to Colombia. She loves to show visitors the global map on her basement wall, with pins dotting scores of locations on every continent of her travels.
“I want to continue winning souls for the Lord and reaching out to the poor — poor of spirit and poor of physical needs,” she said. “I will continue with it and then ask the Lord to pass the gifts that he has given to me to whoever would be the next president of CWIA, so it will go on winning souls for eternity until Jesus returns.”
