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, August 15th, 2019. And today is a wonderful feast in our Catholic Church. It is also a holy day of obligation. Today is the feast day of the Assumption of Mary into heaven. Now, what exactly are we celebrating today? Well, we are celebrating

the end of Mary's life on earth. As you might know, Mary lived quite a long time after Jesus died,

rose, and ascended into heaven. Tradition tells us that she lived under the care of St. John, the Apostle, to whom Christ gave her as a

mother while he died on the cross. Now, we believe that Mary did not die at the end of her life. Instead,

she was assumed by God into heaven. She was taken up into heaven, body and soul.

And once she arrived in heaven, she was crowned as queen of heaven and earth.

So that is what we are celebrating today.

The great final moment of Mary's life on earth when she was

taken up into heaven, body, and soul. Now, this feast day gives us a good example of something

important to understand when we talk about the teaching authority of the Catholic Church.

And that is the difference between

tradition and dogma. Now, the word dogma means simply official teaching of the church.

The church has dogma on several different things on the sacraments, vocations,

the nature of Christ, the nature of God. There are several points of dogma. When you are Catholic,

you agree to believe them all. That is what it means to be Catholic, to believe what the Catholic Church

teaches. It doesn't mean that you need to understand them all perfectly right now, but you

should be working to understand them a little bit better every day. But dogma are basically

the pillars. These things need to be believed and accepted

if you are going to call yourself Catholic. And then there are also traditions. Traditions are things

that they're oftentimes beautiful stories. There're things that maybe we don't have

a ton of physical evidence for. They're sort of those stories that have been passed down through

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