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Catholic Sprout

The Daily Podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hey there, Spouse.

Today is Thursday, October 12, 2012, 2023.

Today is also the feast day of a group of saints that lived in North Africa and died

for the faith in the late four hundreds.

So the story of these martyrs is a little bit complicated,

but it's an important part of church history. So here we go. Back in the late 300s, a heresy or

false teaching emerged called the Aryan heresy. Now at the time they had just created the Nicene Creed,

which we pray each Sunday at Mass. And in that, it makes it clear what we believe about the

Trinity, that there is one God, three persons in this one God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, that they are equal, that they have always existed, that they are all God.

Now, the Aryan heresy denied that Jesus Christ was God.

They had reverence for him, but they just did not think that he was equal to on the same level

as God. Now, this is a heresy. This is false teaching. So then for the next several

centuries, people battled this. There were some really important saints like St. Athanasius

that defended this teaching, that Jesus is indeed

God, defended the Nicene Creed. They were victorious at several councils, and yet this heresy

just kept popping up and popping up. Well, in the 400s, there was a group of traveling barbarians, I don't know, the traveling army.

They conquered Northern Africa. They were called the Vandals. And they, unfortunately, had absorbed this heresy long after it had been defeated in other parts of the world. So they brought the

Aryan heresy back to North Africa. For a couple of years, they ruled without persecuting those

who were loyal to the Nicene Creed, who believed what we believe. But then in the late 400s,

...