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, August 19, 2019. This is Monday, August 19th, 2019. This week on the Catholic Sprouts

podcast, we are going to be talking about some great, great saints who celebrated feast

days over the summer when this podcast was not recording new episodes.

There were some great saints and we simply cannot skip over them.

So today we are starting with a saint that celebrated her feast day on July 6th.

This saint was St. Maria Gretti.

Now, St. Maria Gretti is a great saint for us to talk about because St. Maria Gretti was very young.

She was a child when she fell in love with Jesus and became incredibly committed to both the mass and reconciliation.

She was also a child when she gave her life to remain pure for Jesus.

So first of all, St. Maria Gretti was born in Italy. Her father died when she was very young.

And this left her family very poor. Maria Gretti was the oldest of a number of children,

so she worked very hard to help her mother. They were so poor, in fact, that they had to share a house with another very poor family. Very often Maria's mother went out to do farm work,

and either Maria went with her to do the hard work

or stayed home to take care of the little children in the family. Maria was incredibly dedicated to

going to Mass even though going to Mass every day meant that she had to walk often often barefoot, two miles just to get there and then two

miles back. She also had her confession heard as often as possible. Now, since Maria Gretti

died young, you can probably guess that she died violently,

meaning that she died not of illness, but of violence.

Here's what happened.

Maria Goretty was home one day mending clothes.

Her siblings and her mother were out in the field working, but she had remained

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