GENESEO — She said “yes.”

The question — posed by Darin Ries in an ad in the June 15 issue of The Catholic Post — was, “Molly McKean . . . will you marry me?”

“She giggled for at least half an hour,” said Ries, 34, as he sat in the dining room of his Geneseo home with McKean, 26, last week. Even after 10 days, the couple still laughs as they talk about the proposal she almost missed.

Working nights as a labor/delivery nurse, McKean had been sleeping all day when Ries brought The Catholic Post to her and said there was an article he wanted her to read.

“I looked right past it,” she told The Post. “I thought there was a story about Cursillo or widowed and divorced ministry that he wanted me to see.”

When McKean realized the ad on page 3 contained a proposal for her, Ries placed an engagement ring on her left hand. Despite her mirthful reaction, she was able to tell him she would marry him.

Ries has been asked if he had a pretty good idea of what the answer would be before he asked the question.

“You don’t put something like that in the paper if you’re not sure,” he said with another laugh.

“I wanted to come up with a unique way to propose. I tend to do things a little differently,” said Ries, who works from home as a technical integration manager with Automatic Data Processing Inc.

Willing to make a public declaration of his love and fidelity, he decided to take out an ad in the local paper. With their Catholic faith playing a major role in how they met and courted, however, Ries turned to The Catholic Post.

“I had asked her parents for their blessing a few weeks before,” he explained. “I didn’t really tell anybody except for my mother and one of her friends the night before it came out in The Post.”

They have not set a date for their wedding yet, but hope to do so soon. In the meantime, Ries and McKean are trying to get an Engaged Encounter weekend scheduled and sign up for the natural family planning courses required by the Diocese of Peoria.

“Everybody is very happy for us,” Ries said.

“Yes” was just the beginning.