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

Hey there, Spouts. Today is Monday, March 4th, 2019. It is also the feast day of St. Casimir of Poland.

This week, in the Catholic liturgical calendar, we will be making the transition from ordinary time into Lent.

On the Catholic Sprauds podcast, we'll be talking about some remarkable saints

that will hopefully give us some extra motivation during the Lenton season

and also talking about the change in the liturgical year as it happens.

So today we are going to talk about a great saint, and that saint is the one we

are celebrating today, St. Casimir. He is a really interesting saint. He lived a long time ago,

and he was a prince of Poland, meaning his father was the king. He, however, was the second son, meaning he wasn't necessarily

in line to become the king himself. However, he was expected to live as a prince and to be very

devoted to the wishes of the king, his father. However, from a very young age, St. Casimir knew that he belonged to a higher king, one higher than even his father, and that of course, God the Father and Jesus Christ.

Much of his life was a struggle between serving God, the king of the universe, and the king of Poland, his father.

Now, as you can imagine as a prince of a nation, he lived a pretty pampered life, or at least

he could have lived a pretty pampered life.

From a very young age, however, he began to reject the riches around him, the fine clothes,

and even the very soft bed and rich foods that he was offered every day.

He saw them as a temptation and that those temptations for those fine clothes and rich food

would cause him to forget the true king that he served

Jesus Christ. So instead of wearing the fine clothes of a prince, he dressed very simply. He ate

very simply, or not at all, choosing to fast. And he even gave up a lot of his sleep determined to pray instead of sleep.

And when he did sleep, he chose to sleep on the cold floor instead of his royal bed.

Now, all of this continued on and people made fun of St. Casimir, but he didn't necessarily take much of it to heart.

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