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

Hey there, Sprouts. Today is Tuesday, October 23, 2018. This week on the Catholic Sprouts

podcast, we are talking about bravery. And we are looking at the same saint every day to learn many

lessons about what it means to be brave and bold in our faith and

that saint is pope st. John Paul the great. John Paul was born about a hundred years ago and yesterday

we talked about his growing up and his journey to being our pope. He was ordained Pope,

even though he was Polish. And for the past 500 years, every pope in the Catholic Church

had been from Italy. Now we are going to look at his first lesson on bravery, and he showed us this lesson in his home

country of Poland. Now, if you remember, Poland survived World War II, despite the fact that many,

many people were killed from Poland in the concentration camps.

However, when World War II was over, things weren't necessarily back to normal in Poland.

Poland remained under Soviet control, meaning the government of what is now Russia controlled Poland and they forced them to live under communism.

Communism is ripe with corruption very often and it is also anti-religion.

So the Catholic Church in Poland was persecuted. People did not enjoy very many freedoms

and they were controlled in a lot of ways by the communists. However, one year after Pope John Paul

the second became Pope, he went back to Poland. This was 1979 and the communists were still very much in

control. The communists allowed Pope John Paul II to come back because they thought one of two

things would happen. They thought that they could use him as a puppet, meaning that he would go up there and that he would basically say the things the communist wanted him to say.

They thought perhaps that he would be afraid of them.

If that didn't happen, then they thought that he would induce a riot, that he would tell the people to rebel, that it would create a huge

scene, that people would die, and that they could blame this on the Pope and make him look

terrible.

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