At age 66, Father Peter Adamski became a priest in the town of Stratford, Connecticut, at St. James Church. But his path to the priesthood was not your typical journey.
As a teenager, Adamski believed the Lord was calling him to be a priest. That quickly changed when one day on his college campus, at age 19, he laid eyes on Kathy, the woman who would become his wife of 40 years.
“I go up this set of stairs and I see this vision leaning against the wall,” Adamski told EWTN correspondent Colm Flynn in an interview for “EWTN News In Depth.”
It was love at first sight, Adamski said, and the two married less than two years later.
Adamski joined the pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson at the age of 26 and quickly became a successful business-man.
One day, Kathy confronted him in his office: “She said, ‘Peter, you cannot serve both God and mammon and your corporate career is your mammon and you’-re jeopardizing this marriage.’”
Adamski took this as a wake-up call and began to focus more on his marriage. Soon after, he and his wife had a son, John. Everything seemed to be going perfectly for the family of three until they received unexpected news: Kathy was diagnosed with cancer and early-onset Alzhei-mer’s.
“I can still see us embracing on the sidewalk knowing what we were just told – there’s no cure for Alzheimer’s, it’s the long goodbye. And I knew that our vision of us growing old and stooped over and gray hair toge-ther wasn’t going to happen.”