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

Hey there, Sprout.

Today is Tuesday, February 23rd, 2021.

Today is also the feast day of an early Christian martyr, St. Polycarp. Now, St. Polycarp lived a long time ago. He lived in the year 69 through 155. So just at the very

beginning of our church, in fact, some of his closest friends were those people that wrote the Bible,

including St. John the Evangelist, who was a disciple of Jesus Christ. So Polycarp knew people

that knew Jesus. Polycarp was a very smart and learned man. He was a bishop of an area that is now

part of the country of Turkey, but he lived during a time when it was dangerous to become a

Christian, to profess that you believed in Jesus Christ. He lived until he was 86 years old,

but at that time, the hatred against Christianity was so strong that a group of people in

Smyrna, where he lived, rounded up a whole bunch of old people

that were Christians. They demanded that they renounced their belief in Jesus Christ.

Polycarp refused, welcoming death, and refusing to deny Jesus. They drug him into an auditorium,

and they were determined to burn him alive, but when they lit

the flames, the flames refused to touch this holy man. Finally, he was killed with a dagger,

but from the moment of his death, people recorded his life and recorded the events of his death and they even collected the blood

that fell from his body when he died he has been venerated as a saint with many miracles since all

the way back in the year 155 and has been working on the behalf of the church from heaven since then.

Spouts all week, we will be talking about a reflection given to us by St. Ignatius of

Leola called the Daily Examine.

Now, before we dive into this, we're going to talk a little bit about St. Ignatius,

and we're also going to talk about the proper way to begin this prayer. So first of all, St. Ignatius, and we're also going to talk about the proper way to

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