You're listening to the SSPX Podcast.

We're happy to present another installment of true heroes, stories of the lives of the saints,

delivered by Father Thomas Tam.

Father has also put together a video of each of these episodes.

You can see the video at SSPX Podcast.com.

Now here's Father Tam.

For the zeal of thy house have devoured me, and the reproaches of them that reproached thee

have fallen upon me, and I covered my soul in fasting, and it was made a reproach to me.

Hello, my friends, and welcome to true heroes.

Today we are going to look at the life of St. Francis Karachiolo, whose devotion to the blessed

sacrament gave him the strength to carry all the crosses he had to endure during his life.

Let us begin his story. Francis was born in the kingdom of Naples of the princely family of

Karachiolo.

In childhood he shunned all amusements, recited the rosary regularly, and loved to visit the

Blessed Sacrament, and to distribute his food to the poor.

An attack of a type of leprosy taught him the vileness of the human body and the vanity of the world.

For those of you who don't know, the leprosy is basically your body is corrupting and disintegrating.

And there's not usually, nowadays there's a cure for it. But back then there certainly was not.

Now this doesn't say that it was leprosy in and of itself, but a kind of type of it.

So it's probably a sort of skin disease that he had.

And so he didn't not care really about material things or the world because his body was falling apart as it was anyway.

When he was ordained a priest in Naples, he was miraculously cured of this disease.

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