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, July 29th, 2021. This week we are talking about the fourth beatitude. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

We've talked about how righteousness means holiness and how our desire for a deeper relationship with God, for the actual

relationship with God, the love of God to flow out of us to other people, how that should be

number one for us.

Nothing should be more important than that, even getting enough to eat or drink, that following Christ should be first.

So yesterday we saw this through the example of the Samaritan woman at the well,

as she had this deep longing to know God, even though she was a sinner,

and how God came to her and proclaimed that he was the Messiah.

Now, today, we are going to confront a real truth about this.

And it is this, that following this beatitude,

hungering and thirsting for holiness above everything else,

that there are no excuses acceptable for not doing this.

There are no possible excuses that you can give. Now, to illustrate this,

we are going to look at two holy men who have both been named Blessed by our church. They were both

Italian. Blessed Pierre Giorgio lived about a hundred years ago. And then the other Blessed

Carlo Acudis was actually born in the 1990s, also in Italy. Both of these young men were

just tremendous examples to us, that this real desire to know and love God, to follow him to be holy,

that this should be number one in our life. And there is no excuse because both of these men

had plenty of excuses for not following him. And yet they rejected those excuses and

quested after holiness anyway.

So first of all, Blessed Pierre Giorgio.

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