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

Hey there, Sprouts. Today is Monday, October 22, 2018. It is also the feast day of Pope St. John Paul the Great.

This week on the Catholic Sprouts podcast, we are going to be talking about bravery and what it means to be brave and bold followers

of Jesus Christ. We are going to do something a little bit different, however. We are going to

draw many lessons from the same saint. And the saint we're looking at happens to be today's saint, Pope St. John Paul

II. John Paul the second was Pope during your parents' lifetime. He is a modern saint. He has recently

been ordained and he has many, many things to teach us on the topic of bravery.

But today, we are going to look at his childhood.

Pope John Paul II grew up during a turbulent time in the country of Poland. What happened in history

affected the course of his life directly. But as you'll see as we walk through the events of

his life, he did not allow these things to make him angry or depressed. Instead, he used them to greater glorify the Lord.

Pope John Paul II was born in a small town near Warsaw in the year 1920, so just under 100 years ago. His name when he was born was Carol Watoya. He was the youngest

of three children. His mother died when he was just nine years old. And he had a sister that

had died before he was born. So growing up, it was just his father, John Paul, or Carol

Watoya, and his older brother, who was 13 years older than him. As a child, he was very athletic,

and he grew up in an area where he had many Jewish friends. After he was done with high school,

he enrolled in college in Warsaw.

He studied many things, but among them, and perhaps his favorite, was drama. Pope John Paul II loved to act. However, in 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland. They closed down the university where he was attending,

and they began to export many of his Jewish friends, sending them to work camps and to

execution camps. Because he couldn't go to college, and because he wanted to avoid being taken himself,

Pope John Paul at this time worked at a quarry doing hard labor, mining rocks, and then later

at a dangerous chemical factory. At the age of 20 in 1940, Pope John Paul II's father died.

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