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Catholic sprouts

The Daily Podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hello, Sprouts. Today is Tuesday, July 11th, and is the Feastay of St. Benedict.

I'm Chris Carstens, and I'm glad to be your guest host for the week. I work in the worship office for the Diocese of La Crosse, Wisconsin, and edit a prayer publication

called the Adiramus Bulletin. But mostly what I do is help people to pray, especially the

Mass, and especially my own eight kids. And praying the Mass continues to be our topic for the

week. Today we're going to talk about the sign of the cross. This is the sign of

the cross that you probably make when you enter your pew before mass begins, and it's the sign of

the cross that is used by the priest as mass begins. And we make a number of signs of the cross

throughout the mass. First question I want to ask you is, what are signs and why do we need them?

Well, a sign is anything that you can see or hear or taste or touch or smell

that brings something else to your mind.

Take, for example, if you get home one day and maybe your mom or grandma or somebody

is making cookies in the kitchen and you can smell these, well, that smell of delicious chocolate

chip cookies brings to your mind another reality that, hey, maybe in the kitchen there are

actually cookies there.

So that's an outward sign.

And this is how people communicate.

The voice that you can hear right now is a sign of what I'm thinking.

And hopefully, through this sign that you can hear, it helps you to understand what I'm thinking, too.

This is how human beings communicate through signs, through things we say, through things that we show each other, what we see. This is how

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