You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hey there, Sprouts. Today is Tuesday, August 23rd, 2020. Today is also the feast day of a great Peruvian saint, St. Rose of Lima.

St. Rose of Lima was a beautiful woman who, although her parents tried to get her to marry for years and years, she wanted only to give herself to Jesus Christ. In the end, she lived

as a contemplative, someone that spent almost all of their time in prayer in a small hut

behind her parents' house.

She took on all sorts of penance, including wearing a sharp crown,

and she had invisible stigmata, which meant she suffered the wounds of Christ,

although her skin did not show those wounds.

And her final words before she died of a very painful illness were,

Lord, increase my suffering. She was an incredible example of holiness and love, and we honor her today.

Now, this week on the Catholic Spouts podcast, we are talking about the universal call to holiness,

which is the fact that each of us, even if we aren't called to the religious life, are called to be holy.

And that if we all embrace this calling, we will transform the world.

So today we're going to tackle probably the hardest question. And that question is,

why? Why? Why should I do all this? And now, especially when we look at saints like St. Rose of Lima,

St. Rose of Lima can sometimes be a little bit hard to understand. She chose suffering. She

deliberately put a heavy, prickly, painful crown on her head

every day. And she did all sorts of things like pray kneeling for hours and hours or eat very, very little

food or sleep hardly ever. Now, why did she choose to do these things? And the answer

is love. Love. Love is the only reason why we would pursue holiness. And even more than that,

it's the only reason why we would keep pursuing

holiness, even when we fail and even when it's difficult. Now, a really common question that we

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