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

Hey there, Sprouts. Today is Wednesday, August 21st, 2019. This week on the Catholic Spouts

podcast, we are catching up on all those saints that celebrated feast days over the summer.

We've already talked about St. Maria Kuretti. Yesterday, we talked about St. Cotiri. And today we are talking about

a saint that you might not have heard of. She celebrated her feast day on June 15th, and her name is

St. Germain Cousin. Now, St. Germain was a young girl. She lived in France in the 1500s, so a long time ago,

nearly 500 years ago. And even though you might not have heard of St. Germain today, you certainly

would not have heard about her when she was alive.

St. Germain was the child of a family who did not love her.

In fact, they went out of their way to make her life horrible.

St. Germain was raised by her stepmother.

Her stepmother forced her to live out in the barn with the animals. She oftentimes was not fed and had to eat simply the food that was left over once the dogs or the pigs had finished eating. From birth, she had one arm that was shorter and weaker than the other, so it was

slightly withered and hung at her side. She was horribly abused, and she was forced to shepherd the

flock of animals that her family has. However, she did it in all sorts of weather and was forced to

walk miles and miles without shoes. She suffered horrible frostbite and her feet were very cut up and broken

in the summer. No one hardly knew that St. Germain was alive because her family was so ashamed of her and never took her anywhere or talked about her.

When St. Germain died, she was buried without any special ceremony under the floorboards of her local church.

Now, as I mentioned in the past two saints, we need to pay attention to what happens

after they die, because especially for Port St. Germain, who was so abused and neglected during

her life, her real life began after death, when she was welcomed by her real family, her loving father, God, her adoring mother, Mary.

So there is a lot of stories about what had happened to St. Germain after she died.

First of all, on the night that she was buried, monks witnessed a great light shining forth from the church,

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