By JAMES LIKOUDIS
Prozeller, Ellen Lucey, 32 Days: A Story of Faith and Courage (Pauline Books & Media 2016); available at Amazon.com.
This is the inspiring fictionalized story (but based on fact) of an 11-year-old Chinese Catholic girl, Pei, who sacrificed her life to save and consume 32 Hosts left in an abandoned church after Communist soldiers in 1949 desecrated and well-nigh destroyed the edifice.
Sneaking into the remains of the church night after night for 32 nights and avoiding the brutal guards still guarding it, Pei would prostrate herself before the Lord to make her own Holy Hour and consume the consecrated Hosts. Her heart would not allow her to leave her beloved Jesus abandoned and alone.
On the last night she is discovered and shot to death. The imprisonment of the parish priest and the terror inflicted on the Catholic people of the village by Communist soldiers is dramatically described, as is the Communist ideology that resulted in hatred of the Catholic Church and Catholics being regarded as enemies of the state: “Traitors with foreign ideas and customs have no place in China.”
The martyrdom of Pei was to influence no less a figure famous to all Americans, the Servant of God Archbishop Fulton Sheen, who on one of his TV programs noted: “I’ve been blessed to meet all kinds of famous and important people — but none of them inspired me more than a little Chinese girl. I never met her, but ever since I heard about her, she has inspired me to impress upon my listeners the importance of spending time with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament and not taking Him for granted.”
This was the origin of Bishop Sheen’s never failing to make a Holy Hour before our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament each day.
The author of this book — which received a “Best in Publishing” award from the Association of Catholic Publishers — obviously felt the story of an 11-year-old Chinese Catholic girl would inspire young readers. They need heroes and saints their own age who would love the Lord enough to give their lives for Him. The canonized Fatima children, Saints Jacinta and Francisco, show what heroic virtue children can reach.
The persecution of the Catholic Church in China today further witnesses to the heroic example of bishops, priests, and laity facing a totalitarian power that not only attempts to strangle the Church but to force contraception, abortion, and sterilization on millions of women. Married couples are permitted to have but two children with births separated by four years.
Indoctrination of children and youth in the inhumane creed of Communism remains the order of the day — but neither are children in our own decadent society immune from teachers, government agencies, social workers, and entertainment celebrities introducing them to perversion, pornography, and blasphemy.
Children and their mothers are the greatest casualties of the sexual revolution. Nor can we overlook the sad reality that children in public schools are now being taught they can choose their own sexual lifestyle and gender (apparently, they have 71 genders to pick from).
We have experts in children’s literature on TV and radio programs who bemoan parents’ “obsessive fixation on child innocence” and denounce parents who seek to protect children from the “necessary knowledge” provided by immoral sex education programs that also violate parental rights.
Catholic parents more than ever need to provide sound reading material for their young children and especially books that will confirm them in the supernatural view of life of the Catholic Church.
Young girls could not do better than to be inspired by having their own copy of 32 Days: A Story of Faith and Courage.
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