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Hey there, Sprouts. Today is Thursday, November 22, 2018. It is Thanksgiving Day here in the United States. And around the world in all Catholic churches, today is the feast of one of my favorite saints, St. Cecilia. This week on the Catholic Spouts

podcast, we have been talking about thankfulness, but we have been talking about thankfulness

the right way, a way that includes God. First, we talked about how thankfulness only makes sense

with God. The next day we talked about how it would

be plain crazy not to thank God for the wonderful things in our life. Because refusing to thank

him is saying that I somehow am responsible for all these blessings. And that's just crazy.

Yesterday we talked about all that we have to be thankful for in our Catholic faith,

most especially our advocate, our friend and our mother, Mary.

Today we are going to take a lesson from St. Cecilia.

St. Cecilia is a wonderful example for how we need to remain joyful and thankful, even when things are terrible.

Now, here's a little bit about St. Cecilia.

St. Cecilia lived in Rome a long, long time ago.

She was part of the early church. In fact, she was Christian when it was a very dangerous thing to be a Christian.

The Roman officials persecuted the Christians, and if you were caught practicing the faith,

you were punished and oftentimes put to death. Nevertheless, St. Cecilia loved her faith and continued to worship God. In Rome, still to this day, there are tunnels under the cities called the catacombs.

The catacombs were used as places to bury the dead, and they're oftentimes to this day still

full of skeletons and skulls. Now, it's kind of a creepy place to be. For this reason, most Romans didn't go there

very often, so the early Christians used the catacombs as a place to worship. They gathered there

to say mass and also to bury their dead. Very often their friends, their fellow Christians,

were caught and killed. So while celebrating Mass, they would also say goodbye to their beloved

friends. Now, St. Cecilia was down there one day when she was caught by a Roman official, and we all know what happened to her.

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