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, April 29th, 2021. Today is also the feast day of an Italian saint, a doctor of the church, St. Catherine of Sienna.

St. Catherine of Sienna is an awesome saint. She was so close to Jesus that he oftentimes appeared to her. In fact, he gave her his invisible wounds. She was a bride of Christ.

She gave her life completely to him, just as nuns and religious women still do today. And she had a vision

where they had a mystical wedding, and she wore a wedding ring from Christ. But she wasn't just

sitting around having visions. God gave her some incredible missions as well. During the time of her life,

the Pope was living like a king in France due to all sorts

of problems in the church. St. Catherine of Siena, this pretty much uneducated girl, went to him,

told him to get back to Rome, and guess what, he listened. This was not the end of the problems,

however, later in her life,

there was another huge problem in the church where two different men were claiming that they were popes.

And she worked very hard to bring reconciliation, to fight for the truth, to worship Jesus in the Holy Eucharist.

She's just an incredible, incredible saint. So let's pray through her

intercession that we can be as fiercely devoted to Jesus as she was. Now, all week, we have been

embarking on our new series where we look with fresh eyes around our churches. We've already

talked about the Holy Water font, and how Holy Water reminds us of our baptism when we enter the church.

We talked about genuflection. Yesterday we talked about the altar. Now today we're going to continue to talk about the altar, but we're going to talk about one specific part of it.

The part that we're talking about is something you probably have never seen.

It's called the altar stone.

Now, before we talk about this one part, in the early church, all altars were made out of stone.

That's just probably the easiest material that they had.

And historically, stone has always been a part of altars.

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