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, December 3, 2020. Today is also the feast day of a great missionary saint, St. Francis Xavier. Now, St. Francis Xavier was one of the very first Jesuits.

He also was a missionary to Asia where he went to spread the truth of Jesus Christ,

and he continues to inspire missionaries to this day.

Now, this week we have been talking about great black Catholics, people with dark skin who love Jesus Christ.

And the reason why we are talking about people particularly who are black this week is because I have a strong desire to make sure that no child grows up believing that saints look one particular

way or that there aren't any saints in heaven that look like them.

I really want you to believe that no matter what you look like, the color of your skin,

your hair, your teeth, your eyes, whatever, God is calling you to be a saint

and that he has called other people that look like you to be a saint as well. And when you get to

heaven, you will be amazed to find people that look just like you up there already, no matter what you look like.

So to do this, we have already talked about two venerables, venerable Augustus Tolton from Illinois,

and venerable Henriette Delisle, who lived in New Orleans. Yesterday, we talked about a blessed,

blessed Benedict Desois from South Africa.

And today we are talking about our first saint. And her name, one of my favorites, St. Josephine

Bakita. St. Josephine Bakita was born in the Sudan and she lived in the late 1800s, early 1900s. So she's born in Sudan to a very

happy family. But then when she was nine years old, she was out gathering flowers in the woods

when she was suddenly kidnapped. She was kidnapped and sold into slavery. At the very beginning of her kidnapped, she was forced to walk

600 miles barefoot. And over the next years of her life, she would be bought, sold, and given

away as a slave 12 times. Many of her owners were cruel and horrible to her. They beat her so badly one time that she had to

spend a month in bed. Some of them deliberately scarred her. In fact, and this is so terrible,

my friends, she was beaten so badly by her slave owners that she forgot the name that

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