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

Hey there, Sprouts. Today is Spr, August 17th, 2020. Today is also the feast day of St. Mamas, who was an early Christian martyr. I know this week on the Catholic Spouts

podcast, we are celebrating the launch of our brand new

Be a Saint Kids Club, which we hope you are considering enrolling in.

When we jump into September, this podcast will sound a tiny bit different.

We will be beginning each episode with a prayer that we will be memorizing that month.

And each month, we will have a patron saint that will give us certain challenges so that we can hopefully embrace sainthood like they have.

But this week we are talking about the details of how one becomes a declared saint in the Catholic Church.

Yesterday we talked about step one, which is

that they're dead. And today we're going to talk about step two, which means the church has

declared them a servant of God. But before we get there, let's talk about our patron saint of

the day, who is St. Mammis, who is a great child saint from the early church.

Now, St. Mammis was a Roman. His parents were Christian, and unfortunately, he lived during

the time period when it was still illegal to be a Christian. His parents were arrested, they refused

to offer worship to pagan gods, and they were martyred for their faith.

So even though this happened when St. Mamos was a very little boy, he was taken, he was raised by other Christians, and he grew in holiness.

He eventually became a shepherd, and he was known for his great love of animals.

He also loved Jesus so much that he would often preach and read scripture and there are stories of sheep gathering around him out in the pasture to hear about Jesus.

Other stories talk about how Mamos had a pet lion, how a lion would follow him around and purr and love to hear him speak about Jesus.

Eventually, St. Mamos was arrested for being a Christian himself.

He bravely stood before the authorities at his trial, and some legends even say that he

took his pet lion to stand guard while he was on trial. Eventually in the year two, 75, he was killed

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