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This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute,

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

Hi, welcome to Catholic Saints. My name is Mary McGeehan, and today I'm joined with Dr. Ben

Akers. I work here at the Augustine Institute. Dr. Akers here is the chief content officer at

the Augustine Institute. Thank you for joining. Today we're going to dive into the life of St.

Polycarp. Ben, tell us what do we need to know about St. Polycarp? There is wonderful things to know about St. Polycarp. He, first and foremost, it's not a name that you hear often. No. Not a lot of little boys running around St. Polycarp. But he's one of the great heroes of the early church. He is a, I'll give you his dates. We celebrate his feast day February 23rd.

So if you want to mark your calendar, February 23rd is his feast day. It's actually the day that he

dies. And we have, we have words of St. Polycarp. We have the account of his martyrdom.

We have letters that he received from a saint. So he is an incredible gift that we have to the church.

So he's a bridge between the apostles, the apostolic age, and then kind of the second

century. So he's born around 70 AD and then is marty-55-156 AD. Okay. So you would call,

could you call him an apostolic father? Would that be a proper title?

Yeah, that's great. And by Apostolic Father, yeah, exactly. These are the men that knew the

apostles. So he knew an Apostle. Do you remember which one from St. John? Yeah. Good. Yeah. So Mary is a

proud, we're very proud of her as a graduate of the Augustine Institute. And yes, that's right. He studied under, he knew John the Apostle, the beloved disciple who laid his head on the heart of Christ. I just think that's mind-blowing, though, to be two degrees away from Jesus, you know, to be disciples by the man who's reclined his head on Jesus's chest. I think that's incredible. I know exactly.

So he would have known, you could think of the stories that he knew about Christ that we don't have recounted in the Gospels for us. Yeah. Right? Because John says, I can't write it all down because it would fill all the books of the world. And so he knew stories about Jesus that we don't know. Okay, but fun question. if you were polycarp what would you ask St. John?

If I was St. Polycarp, what would ask John?

Yep, about Jesus that we don't know. Okay, but fun question. If you were Polycarp, what would you ask St. John? If I was St. Polycarp, what would ask John? Yep, about Jesus, about the early Christian fathers, apostles. Yeah, that's a quick, yeah, I would probably say what was, you know, tell me a story about Jesus that you haven't told me before. Yeah. And you probably, because that's, That's what I actually like to do when I meet, like, for example,

the missionaries of charity.

They,

you know,

...