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

Hey there, Sprouts. Today is Thursday, January 17th, 2019. It is also the feast day of St. Anthony of Padua, or as he is known in Portugal, his home country, St. Anthony of Lisbon. St. Anthony is a wonderful saint. He was a Franciscan who lived many years ago.

Born in Portugal, lived most of his ministry out in Italy. But he is also the intercessor of

lost things. So if you've ever lost things and said the prayer, St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come around.

Something is lost that cannot be found without your help.

Then you have used the intercession of St. Anthony.

But he was a profound example of the virtue that we are talking about this week, the virtue of faith.

And he, like so many other saints that came before him, that came after him, that still live today,

they are all examples of how faith, once we have really drawn near to God and received this virtue,

how the virtue of faith can transform our lives

utterly. So today we're not only going to talk about St. Anthony of Lisbon or Padua,

wherever you want to say he was from. We're going to talk about several other saints.

We're going to talk about how they came to the virtue of faith or how God chose a situation to bestow this virtue on them, but also how their life was transformed.

So let's start with one saint way in the beginning. Let's start with St. Matthew. So St. Matthew wrote the gospel of Matthew,

but as you might know, he was a tax collector. Now, tax collectors were seen as sinners. They were

despised in the time of Jesus, and oftentimes they were greedy and totally corrupt. St. Matthew was in the

work of collecting taxes when Jesus called him.

And although we don't get to crawl inside the mind of St. Matthew, we do get to see what he did.

He immediately stood up, left behind his tax collecting post, and followed Jesus. In some gospel accounts were told that he

says he will make right any wrongs he did while collecting taxes, and we know that he was one of

Jesus' closest followers. So St. Matthew's moment where he received the virtue of faith, it was a solitary moment.

Jesus came to him personally, called him by name, and he was transformed in that moment.

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