Publisher's Synopsis
On Easter Sunday, 1928, Father Hammer and Father Basil celebrated the last Easter Sunrise High Mass in front of an insane communist colonel and his band of pyromaniacs, revealing the Diamond Teardrop in the stained glass windows behind the altar. Later that morning, the colonel ordered his soldiers to loot and vandalize the magnificent church, destroying almost everything not worth hauling away. He forced Hammer and Basil into the confessional booth, chained the doors closed from the outside and screamed his hatred at the men before he lit Saint Francis on fire. The basilica burned to the ground, its bell lying buried under the rubble for the next thirteen years. And now, in late 1953, Captain Van Vedic returned the famous bell to its new home, to the community it had belonged to in the first place and the church of Holy Cross. Pfeiffer to Pfeiffer, one continent to another. A journey of a lifetime, one larger-than-life man's dream of setting things right.
