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Catholic Sprouts,

the daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hello, sprouts. Today is Tuesday, October 8th, 2020. And today we celebrate the Feast Day of St. Reparada. My name is Father Andrew Hamilton of the Diocese of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, and this week we're going over the signs and symbols of the faith.

But first, let's talk about our saint of the day.

Saint Reparada was a virgin martyr of Caesarea in Palestine.

She was a 20-year-old girl in Caesarea who was denounced as a Christian during persecutions launched by the Roman Emperor of the time.

She was tortured and thrown into a furnace for her faith.

There, miraculously trusting in God and his providence, she survived the flames,

and she still refused to sacrifice to pagan gods after being taken out of the furnace,

and so she was beheaded for her faith.

She is the co-patronist of the city of Florence in Italy, and she is a sign to us of God's

providence even in the midst of difficulty, but also that she was in a way fireproof because of her faith. A way in which that we are fireproof is through our baptism.

Today we will talk about the sign of holy water stemming from our baptism.

Water is a sign of life. Whenever scientists are looking for other planets in outer space,

the first thing that they look for on other planets is water,

because it's a sign of life.

God used the sign of water for life in the Old Testament.

The waters were divided, and thus out of that form was void,

came the earth and the sky, and thus the creation of the world. Water is used for purification

as well. We think of Noah's flood, purifying the earth, and bringing forth new life after even destruction.

Water is used in the New Testament, of course, by Jesus himself who is baptized by John in the Jordan River,

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