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

Hey there, Sprouts, Today is Wednesday, August 24th, 2020. Today is also the feast day of one of the original 12 apostles, St. Nathaniel. St. Nathaniel was called by Jesus. The story is that Jesus saw him under the fig tree and called him.

St. Nathaniel went on to preach the good news after Pentecost and tradition tells us that he was martyred by being beheaded.

Now this week on the Catholic Sprouts podcast, we are talking about holiness.

We are talking about the universal call to holiness, the fact that we all are called to pursue holiness, and through this, the world will be transformed.

And yesterday we talked about the fact that love, Love is the reason why we do all these things.

Love is the reason why we stop asking, well, what is the littlest amount I could do here?

We instead look with Jesus with love.

And that is what keeps us going even when we fail.

So today we're going to start talking about these three

things we do to become holy and how any normal Christian can become holy by practicing these.

The first of the three is that we practice virtue. So first of all, what is virtue? Well, virtue is an action that is good, that is motivated by

good, good for myself, good for you, good for God. Now, good can be kind of one of those loose words

that it's hard to understand what it means. But remember, we know that God is the ultimate source of all that

is good, all that is true, all that is beautiful. He is the source of that. So when we act in accord

with God's will, with the way God designed us, when we think of others, when we give of ourselves,

when we are honest, then we are walking

in virtue. Now, the other side of this, of course, is vice. Vice is a sin that has become a habit.

So, for example, we can sin by telling a lie once, but if we start to tell lots of lies,

and it's almost like we're telling a lie before we even realize we're doing it, then we have

acquired a vice, a sinful vice. And that's just what Satan wants us to do. He wants to get us so

used to sinning that it's our habit that he has us right where he wants us. So in order to shake off vice, we need to first of all go to confession. We need to re-engage with Jesus Christ through prayer. And we need to work hard to make better choices at each

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