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

Hey there, Sprouts. Today is two- October 13th, 2020. This week on the Catholic Sprouts podcast, we are talking about Jesus' growing up years, which all took place in the small,

unimportant village of Nazareth. So we've already talked about what Jesus' house probably looked like. And today we are going to talk about something that was

very important to marry Jesus and Joseph, and that is their faith. Now, being a Jew who lived in Nazareth

meant that you had to make pilgrimage. Now, this might be hard for us to understand, but even in the

little town of Nazareth, there was a synagogue. This was a place where people gathered on the

Sabbath. They would pray and talk

about the faith and read from the Torah, but it was more of a community center. There was only one

true temple where you could really encounter God and worship, and that one temple was in Jerusalem. Therefore, the devout male Jews

went to Jerusalem three times a year. Sometimes we think about St. Joseph journeying to Bethlehem

with Mary, like he was setting out on a path that he'd never been down before.

That's not true.

St. Joseph went down that path to Jerusalem, which was very near to Bethlehem, three times a year.

It was a five-day walk.

If you were a healthy man, you could make it in five days.

But that meant a five day walk there,

spending some time in Jerusalem, and then a five day walk back. And so the pilgrimages took a lot

of time out of life. We know from the gospel that Joseph was a devout Jew, so he definitely

would have spent that time walking to Jerusalem and

walking back. And as soon as Jesus was able, he would have joined his father as well. In fact,

the one story that we have about Jesus while he was growing up comes from one of these pilgrimages to Jerusalem.

It's clear that their whole extended family loved their Jewish faith and took practicing it

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