Hi, I'm Edward Sree, and welcome to all things Catholic where real faith meets real life.

Hi and welcome back today I want to take you on pilgrimage on pilgrimage to the

city of Rome and I want to take you to two churches in Rome

that are related to the great feast day the church is preparing to celebrate this

week. You may know that the church celebrates the Feast of. Matthew this week on September 21st and I think of all the

apostles to me Matthew is the most fascinating he is the most I mean, think about who this man was and what Jesus

did in his life. I mean, this man is a tax collector. Now, in our culture today, we may not

like the IRS or people that come to take our taxes, but I want

you understand what it meant to be a tax collector in Matthew's day, in the first century

world of Judaism in his day.

Being a tax collector meant you were a Jew that was chosen by the Roman government

to go around and collect the taxes on behalf of the Roman Empire.

So this is a man who's collaborating with the Roman enemy,

who's oppressing the Jewish people.

He would have been viewed as a great traitor.

And he also would have been viewed as a great sinner because many tax collectors were known for taking too much money for themselves

And so they were viewed as unjust and exploiting the Jewish people so think about what we read about in the Gospels, how Jesus

was known for spending time with the tax collectors. He was known for hanging out at the

tax collectors office, for sharing meals with the tax collectors.

Just think about how shocking that would have been.

Why is Jesus hanging out with these people?

And then one day Jesus actually turns and points to one of these tax collectors

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