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 24th, 2019. It is also the feast day of St. Francis DeSales.

St. Francis DeSales lived during the Reformation period in Europe. He was a priest and a bishop, and he wrote some beautiful things that are

still helping us on our prayer lives today. This week on the Catholic Sprouts podcast, we have

been talking about the theological virtue of hope. With the help of St. Agnes, we were reminded that hope means placing all of our trust in God

and knowing that our true home is not here on earth. Our true home is heaven. On Tuesday,

we talked about how we need to remain hopeful during these hard times on earth when we might have evil things

happening around us and laws that allow those things to happen. We talked about how hope means

not simply being optimistic, but placing all of our trust in God, that he alone will use this for his purpose and that he has a plan

to correct these evils. On Wednesday, we talked about how hope is our lifeboat. And hope connects us to

heaven and connects us to those that have gone into death before us and reminds us of our need to pray for them.

Today, with the help of St. Francis DeSales, we are going to talk about how hope reminds us

that holiness is possible for all of us, but none of us can make ourselves holy on our own.

So again, St. Francis de Sales lived during the Reformation period in Europe.

Now, in case you don't know what that means, the Reformation was a pretty difficult time in the church.

For a long time after Jesus Christ died, there was one Christian church. People were

reunited. There wasn't, if you think about the city that you live in, there's probably a Catholic

church, but then maybe also a Lutheran church, a Baptist church, an evangelical church.

There's tons of different Christian churches, and many, many more than that.

Before the Reformation, there was just one.

But then certain people started to disagree with the church. They started to break apart and form different Christian churches.

There was a lot of violence during this time, many arguments, many misunderstandings.

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