You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hey there, Sprouts. Today is Monday, September 23rd, 2019. It is also the feast day of St. Padre Pio.

This week on the Catholic Sprouts podcast, we are taking advantage of the last week of September

to prepare for October, the month of the rosary. To do this,

we are going to talk about what it means to be a warrior of the rosary and why you should

become one. So to start out, we are going to talk about today's patron saint, who is an incredible saint, Saint Padre Pio.

Now, Saint Padre Pio lived in the late 1800s all the way to the middle of the 1900s.

So his life overlapped with maybe your parents, but definitely your grandparents' life.

So he did not live that long ago.

And he was incredible.

He lived in Italy.

He was a priest, but he was a stigmatist and a mystic.

Now, we talked about both of these turns before on this podcast, but to remind you,

a stigmatist is someone who receives the wounds of Christ. They can be various wounds, but in St.

Padre Pio's case, he received the nail marks of Jesus in his hand.

These weren't something he gave to himself.

They were a mystical gift.

They did not heal, but he wore gloves over them oftentimes to hide the wounds to draw less attention to himself.

But there were something he received so that he might better

understand the suffering of Jesus. Saint Padre Pia was also a mystic, which means he had

mystical experiences where he had visions of Jesus and Mary. Now, we know a lot of interesting things about St. Padre Pio, but one of the

most obvious things about this saint is that he loved the rosary. He was devoted to it. And he

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