{"id":416,"date":"2009-04-13T20:00:36","date_gmt":"2009-04-13T20:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/04\/griefs-and-anxieties.html"},"modified":"2009-04-13T20:00:36","modified_gmt":"2009-04-13T20:00:36","slug":"griefs-and-anxieties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/04\/griefs-and-anxieties.html","title":{"rendered":"Griefs and anxieties…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\"Nick<\/span>The death of the young Angels’ pitcher, Nick Adenhart<\/a>, and two others in the car he was driving, was one of those tragedies that hits you in the gut, even though it happens very day, everywhere–a drunk driver plowing into a car of young people. But of course, this was a public personality, in a way, it was during Holy Week, and Adenhart had so much promise. He had just pitched the fourth–and best–game of his major league career, and after the game, Adenhart told reporters he felt “just a lot more relaxed, self-confident.” <\/p>\n

His father had also flown out from Maryland to watch his son win convincingly. He flew home with the body, to a family and, as CNS reports<\/a>, a parish in grief–St. Augustine in Williamsport, where his father, grandparents and other family members belong: <\/font><\/p>\n

\n

Jim and Connie Adenhart, the baseball standout’s grandparents, spent more than an hour in prayer at St. Augustine after hearing about the death, according to Father Stephen Hook, pastor at St. Augustine.<\/p>\n

“They’re very heartbroken,” he told The Catholic Review, Baltimore’s archdiocesan newspaper.<\/p>\n

“I embraced them both and let them express what was going on,” said Father Hook. “They brought pictures to the church of their grandson as a 4-year-old, when he was in high school and of him with the Angels. They were so proud of him.”<\/p>\n

Adenhart played basketball at St. Maria Goretti before transferring to Williamsport High School in his junior year. While pitching for Williamsport High, he suffered a serious injury to his pitching elbow right before the June 2004 major league draft — causing him to sink to the 14th round when he was drafted by the Angels.<\/p>\n

“All the teams walked away from him except for the Angels,” Father Hook said. “His grandparents felt very highly of the Angels for being generous to him.”<\/p>\n

Adenhart needed ligament transplant surgery and the Angels gave him a $710,000 signing bonus and offered him the opportunity to rehabilitate under the team’s care. He rose up through the ranks in the team’s minor league system.<\/p>\n

The Adenhart family released a written statement thanking the Angels for their help.<\/p>\n

“He lived his dream and was blessed to be part of an organization comprised of such warm, caring and compassionate people,” the statement said. “The Angels were his extended family. Thanks to all of Nick’s loyal supporters and fans throughout his career. He will always be in everyone’s hearts forever.”<\/p>\n

Father Hook said the phone was “ringing off the hook” at St. Augustine with calls from concerned parishioners and others in the community. Interviewed as the parish made its preparations for Holy Week, the pastor said Adenhart’s death would “have a sobering impact” on the celebration.
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The death of the young Angels’ pitcher, Nick Adenhart, and two others in the car he was driving, was one of those tragedies that hits you in the gut, even though it happens very day, everywhere–a drunk driver plowing into a car of young people. But of course, this was a public personality, in a way,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,7,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nGriefs and anxieties... - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/04\/griefs-and-anxieties.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Griefs and anxieties... - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The death of the young Angels’ pitcher, Nick Adenhart, and two others in the car he was driving, was one of those tragedies that hits you in the gut, even though it happens very day, everywhere–a drunk driver plowing into a car of young people. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}