Los Angeles, Calif., Jan 26, 2020 / 02:08 pm (CNA).- Basketball superstar Kobe Bryant died Sunday in a helicopter crash in Southern California. Bryant, the father of four, was 41.
Bryant’s daughter Gianna, 13, was reportedly killed in the helicopter crash as well, along with another teen and her parent, and the helicopter’s pilot. They were reportedly traveling to a basketball game.
Bryant is widely considered one of the greatest basketball players of all time. He retired in 2016 after a 20 year career with the Los Angeles Lakers, in which the shooting guard won five NBA championships, a league MVP award, two scoring championships, and myriad other distinctions.
Beyond basketball, Bryant was a husband and a father who in 2015 attributed his Catholic faith with helping him move past a challenging period in his own life and the life of his family.
Bryant was raised in a Catholic family, and spent much of his childhood living in Italy. He married in 2001 in a Southern California parish.
In 2003, Bryant was arrested after he was accused of raping a woman in a Colorado hotel room.
Bryant admitted a sexual encounter with the woman, but denied that he had committed sexual assault. When the allegation became public, Bryant lost sponsors and faced criminal charges, which were eventually dropped.
Bryant issued an apology to his accuser, with whom he also reached a settlement in a civil lawsuit.
“Although I truly believe this encounter between us was consensual, I recognize now that she did not and does not view this incident the same way I did. After months of reviewing discovery, listening to her attorney, and even her testimony in person, I now understand how she feels that she did not consent to this encounter,” Bryant said in his 2004 apology.
In 2015, the basketball player told GQ that after the matter was resolved, he decided to shed some superficiality he felt he had built up in his public persona.
“What I came to understand, coming out of Colorado, is that I had to be me, in the place where I was at that moment.”
Bryant said it was a priest who helped him to make some important personal realizations during the ordeal.
Describing his fear of being sent to prison for a crime he believed he had not committed, Bryant told GQ that “The one thing that really helped me during that process—I’m Catholic, I grew up Catholic, my kids are Catholic—was talking to a priest.”
“It was actually kind of funny: He looks at me and says, ’Did you do it?’ And I say, ’Of course not.’ Then he asks, ’Do you have a good lawyer?’ And I’m like, ’Uh, yeah, he’s phenomenal.’ So then he just said, ’Let it go. Move on. God’s not going to give you anything you can’t handle, and it’s in his hands now. This is something you can’t control. So let it go.’ And that was the turning point,” Bryant said.
A 2004 decision to place deeper trust in God did not mean the basketball star’s life was thereafter without difficulties, or defined by virtue.
In 2011, Vanessa Bryant filed for divorce from Kobe, citing irreconcilable differences. But Bryant said he decided not to give up on his marriage, and two years later, his wife withdrew her divorce petition.
“I’m not going to say our marriage is perfect, by any stretch of the imagination,” Bryant told GQ in 2015.
“We still fight, just like every married couple. But you know, my reputation as an athlete is that I’m extremely determined, and that I will work my ass off. How could I do that in my professional life if I wasn’t like that in my personal life, when it affects my kids? It wouldn’t make any sense.”
Bryant and his wife have been reported to be regular parishioners at an Orange County, California parish.
Singer Cristina Ballestero posted on Instagram Jan. 26 a story of her encounter with Bryant at Holy Family Cathedral in Orange, California at a weekday Mass.
“As we went up to communion, [Bryant] waited for me to go. If you grew up in the Catholic Church, you understand this is a respectful thing men do in church as a sign of respect to women. He said I have a beautiful voice.”
“His most inspiring trait was his decision to turn to his faith in God and receive God’s mercy and to be a better man after a regretful decision,” Ballestero added.
Bryant also had connected his Catholic faith to a family commitment to help the poor, through the Kobe & Vanessa Bryant Family Foundation. The foundation helped fund youth homeless shelters and other projects aimed at serving the poor.
“You have to do something that carries a little bit more weight to it, a little more significance, a little more purpose to it,” he said in 2012, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Homelessness “is one that kind of gets pushed on the back burner because it’s easy to point the blame at those who are homeless and say, ‘Well, you made that bad decision. This is where you are. It’s your fault.”
“In life, we all make mistakes and to stand back and allow someone to live that way and kind of wash your hands of it … that’s not right,” he said.
Funeral announcements for Bryant and his daughter have not yet been announced.
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Let’s pray for the eternal rest of Kobe Bryant’s soul and that of his daughter Gianna. We pray for him and her not because of his notoriety or celebrity but because of the absolute notoriety, absolute celebrity and absolute authority of the ONE he believed in, Jesus Christ. For me, Kobe’s greatest merit is that he lived in reality, built his life there, failed there and allowed Jesus to save and redeem his life THERE, in REALITY. Recently, Candace Owens was barred from a show because just because she said that men don’t give birth to babies. The so-called Left wants you and all of us deep into their world of make-believe. They can’t make any progress in reality but only in fantasy. Kobe Bryant died tragically but did live in reality.
He accepted his previous tragic error, and did the hard work of restoring his character, his life and his marriage through his Faith. On the other hand, the anti-God groups see themselves as “Automatic Saints” just because of the false saving and redeeming fantasy of their “social activism”, which requires no self-examination, no authentic responsibility, no self-correction, no real change, no real growth. Kobe didn’t live like that even though he had the chance to hide behind his infinitely greater “weight” of celebrity that 99.99% of them do not have.
He worked very hard, as was his habit, to become a much better man, something infinitely superior to just being an athlete. It’s way overdue for Catholics to stop supporting the make-believe, anti-God, false “world saviors”, who are destroying the world and the Church in the laziest way ever seen in history: with the full cooperation of too many sentimentalist Catholics, Clergy and Laity. Kobe didn’t die the way he did because “God punished him” but because he truly repented, truly changed and was forgiven (“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” – 1 John 1:9), and his reward was ready for him in Heaven, and he is helping us by showing us the way there, IN REALITY, hand in hand with his beautiful daughter. All praise and honor be to God!!
Tonight, here in Canada, I attended an Opus Dei Circle (a group meeting to hear a reflection on the Word of God). Towards the end of the night, Kobe Bryant’s name came up.
I am not a sportsfan, tho’ I swam competitively in my teens (almost 50 years, and many lbs, ago). And Kobe, while he was a sports superstar, was to me a man severely compromised by the sexual charges he faced in 2003.
And then I read this article above, and came to appreciate that Mr. Bryant truly superseded the fame & glory this world deals in & respects, by his humble statement to the young lady who he had wronged (as he admitted he had inadvertantly done). And also by his turning to his faith, and fighting to save his marriage, and to live his life as a practicing Catholic.
May his wife, Vanessa, be comforted by his Christian walk, and by their shared love and by the family that they brought into this world. And may Kobe and his daughter Gianna have been welcomed by Our Loving Saviour, and by Our Blessed Mother’s embrace. Amen.