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, February 12th, 2019. This week on the Catholic Sprouts

podcast, we are talking about purity. Yesterday, we started talking about these things with

Our Lady of Lords and St. Bernadette. Today, we're going to dive into what exactly

purity is. So now to explain this, I want you to

keep an image in mind. When we were baptized, whether you were baptized as a baby or when you

entered the church, you had some sort of a baptismal gown. That baptismal gown is white and perfectly clean. It is pristine. It's not like

something that you ate spaghetti in and got dirty. It is perfectly clean. So keep that baptismal gown

in mind. And remember that when you are baptized, God washes away original sin.

Even if you are baptized as an adult, he washes away all sin up to that point. So you are

pure. You are clean. You are perfect. Now I want you to tell you a story. There's a book called The Picture of

Doreen Gray. It was written by Oscar Wilde, who lived in Great Britain about 200 years ago.

Now, this is a complicated book, but here is the essential storyline. There's a young man who's a good man and someone paints

a picture of him. But of course, it's a little bit magical. This young man is, we can say that he is

pure and good at this point and he is beautiful on the outside, that his interior soul is as beautiful as his exterior, and he is just

really amazingly beautiful created by God. However, he hides this portrait away in his attic,

and he starts living a very bad life.

He treats people badly, he treats himself badly, he really is just living a very horrible life.

And yet, on the outside, his face remains beautiful and perfect.

But this portrait, which he has hidden away up in his attic, begins to get uglier and uglier.

It turns into a bit of a monster.

And he realizes this and he becomes even more ashamed of it and hides it away.

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