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

Hey there, Sprouts.

Today is Friday, September 21st, 2018.

It is also the feast day of the Apostle, St. Matthew, the Evangelist.

This week on the Catholic Sprouts podcast, we have been talking about evangelization.

First, we talked about how our faith is the truth, and we are charged to share it with everybody. Next, we talked about the two

ways that we can evangelize. First, we can evangelize by showing our lives to everybody and how our faith is lived out.

Next, we can evangelize with words by actually knowing our faith and talking about it with those that we love.

Yesterday, we talked about some amazing Korean martyrs who gave their lives to practice and share their faith.

Today, with help of St. Matthew the Evangelist, we are going to talk about the Holy Word of God

and how that plays such an important role in evangelization. But first, let's talk about St. Matthew.

St. Matthew was one of the 12 apostles that Jesus gathered around him and taught while he was here

on earth. But St. Matthew has an interesting story before he even became an apostle. Before he knew Jesus, Matthew worked as a tax

collector. Now, at the time of Jesus' life, the Jews were not free. They lived under Roman occupation,

which meant that they lived under Roman law. That also meant that they regularly had to

pay taxes to the Roman government and to whom they called Caesar, who was sort of like the king of

Rome. Now, the Jews were not happy about this.

They didn't particularly like Rome, and they didn't like having to pay taxes to Rome either.

So certain Jews decided to be tax collectors, and they were not popular people, because a tax collector wasn't necessarily paid by Rome. They were simply told that they collected taxes and they could keep a little bit for themselves. Certain tax collectors got very

selfish and were very mean in the way that they collected taxes from the Jewish people. So therefore

the tax collectors were seen as sinners and they were despised.

So the simple fact that Jesus went to eat at Matthew's house and talk with Matthew made many of the Pharisees upset.

...