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, February 3, 2020. This week on the Catholic Sprouts, we are going to dive into the next sacrament that we have to talk about, and that sacrament

is holy matrimony or marriage.

But before we get there, let's talk about today's saint.

Today, February 3rd, is the feast day of St. Blaze.

Now, St. Blaze lived a long time ago before there was very many written records, but we do know a couple of things about

St. Blaze. First of all, we know that he was a bishop, and we also know that he was

martyred for his faith. For as long as tradition has lasted, St. Blaze has been the patron saint

of throat diseases.

Now, this is because during his lifetime, he was a physician of souls.

People came to him and he prayed very hard for their salvation.

One of the legends about St. Blaze is that when he was arrested and being taken to jail where he would eventually be

martyred, a woman came to him with her only son who was choking on a fishbone. St. Blaze blessed

him, prayed for him, and miraculously, the boy survived. Oftentimes St. Blaze is pictured holding two candles tied together with a ribbon

and in the form of an X. Very oftentimes, churches have throat blessing on the feast day of St.

Blaze, which is today, and the priests will likely take these two candles,

place it on either side of your throat. Once again, today we are starting to talk about the

sacrament of marriage. Before we dive into the details of marriage, though, I want you to know that

both marriage and holy orders are a new kind of sacrament. We've already talked about

sacraments of initiation that welcome us into the faith. Most obviously, those are baptism,

which we are, which we receive when we're little. And then confirmation, which renews all of those promises, we make

them ourselves as an adult. And God pours the grace of the Holy Spirit onto us. Next, we've talked

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