You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute,

an Apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.

Hello everybody and welcome to Catholic Saints, the podcast about the lives of the saints and their legacy for the church and for us. I'm Taylor Kemp, your host, and I'm joined today by Dr. Elizabeth Klein.

Hi, Taylor.

Dr. Klein. I used to do Catholic Saints podcasts and I don't get to do them anymore and now we're back together again. It's true. This is very fun. I am so excited. Are you as excited as I am? I am as excited as you are. I can hear it. I can hear your voice. Audience out there, we know you are excited as well. Okay. Dr. Klein, have you ever done a podcast or a class or anything on St. Agnes of Rome before. I was trying to think if you did it

in the martyrs series. No, not specifically. I don't think I've specifically talked about St. Agnes.

I have done a lot of work on early Christian martyrs, but not St. Agnes in particular. I don't think.

Sweet. It's a first. All right. So everybody today, we are talking about St. Agnes of Rome.

Her feast day is on January 21st. And her dates are 291 to 304. My daughter is named Agnes. But as Dr. Klein asked me,

was, is she named after that St. Agnes of Rome? She is not. She's named after

Mother Teresa, but we love St. Agnes too. Okay, so Dr. Klein, where should we begin when we're

talking about St. Agnes? Yeah, I know. I think St. Agnes is kind of a household name. She's a

well-known saint, but people might not know much about her or at least might not know how we get any

information about St. Agnes. A lot of these early Christian martyrs, we might just know

they're martyrs, but we don't have a whole lot of information until long after their death,

other than that they died for the faith. And sometimes you can even get some pretty

incredible legends associated with them, but they may or may not really reflect the actual story.

But in St. Agnes's case, it's really cool because we actually have a comments about her in a text of St. Ambrose quite close to the time that she died.

And Taylor has another child named Ambrose. This is a very cool. Connection was not planned. But God know. And actually the reason I specifically wanted to do Agnes or think about her. Well, for one thing that we had this relic from Ambrose about her, but also we have a statue of St. Agnes now in our chapel. We do. It is a really interesting

collection. We have these beautiful new marble statues here in our chapel, and we have the Sacred Heart,

Joseph, Mary, and Agnes. Yes. I was like, I feel like we should probably up our devotion to Agnes

since she made the top four sort of statues. She's prominently placed in our chapel. She is. So Agnes is a virgin martyr,

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