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Catholic sprouts

The daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hey there, sproutsouts. Today is Tuesday, March 18th, 20205. Today is also the feast day of St. Cyril of Jerusalem.

St. Cyril of Jerusalem lived around the same time as St. Patrick in the 300s, although the two likely never met because St. Cyril of Jerusalem lived in Jerusalem. He grew up in a Christian family.

He was brilliant. He trained as a priest was eventually ordained a bishop of Jerusalem.

But he lived during a very difficult time.

If you remember, the first 300 years of Christianity from about the year 33 through probably just after 300,

the Christian church was persecuted throughout the Roman Empire, which was pretty much

much of the known world. Christians died as martyrs everywhere, and the church was largely

underground. But during the lifetime of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, that ended because Constantine,

with the help of his mother, St. Helena,

converted to Christianity and began to promote the faith. One of the things that Constantine

encouraged is that church leaders get together and define what they believe. Because you can

imagine, with Jesus gone and the church growing and

encountering all of these different cultures and people living hundreds and hundreds of miles

apart, there was no email, no phone calls, that things could become confused and that even

people might be practicing the faith slightly different in these

different areas. So Constantine called everyone together to get on the same page. Well, one of the

things that church leaders, people we now know as church doctors, worked hard to do during the

three and four hundreds, was not only to write down what we actually

believe as Christians, but also to fight false teachings.

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