‘Not Sure if I’m in Heaven or if I’m Home’ : Cheering Friends in Joliet Welcome a Fatigued Jenco

Cheering, flag waving hometown friends greeted Father Lawrence Martin Jenco on Saturday as he ended a strenuous seven-day odyssey that took him from captivity in Lebanon to the world’s citadels of religious and political power.

“I’m not sure if I’m in heaven or if I’m home,” a frail and fatigued Jenco said as his convertible moved along Joliet’s main street, where an estimated 10,000 people lined the curbs to welcome him.

“I’m overwhelmed,” Jenco added as the 50-car motorcade inched toward a downtown theater where almost 2,000 more people waited for him. The total turnout represented approximately one-sixth of the population of this blue-collar town 40 miles south of Chicago.

Blesses Newlyweds

Along the way, the priest, who in the last week visited Pope John Paul II, the Archbishop of Canterbury and President Reagan, was handed bouquets of flowers, a bag of sweet corn and a root beer. He stopped the motorcade once to bless Timothy Emerson and Becky, his wife of one hour, who had waited for Jenco in their wedding whites.

“Bless you. May your marriage be happy,” Jenco said.

“You got blessed by one cool dude,” said Rae Jean Rafter, the couple’s maid of honor.

Jenco’s triumphant return home came exactly one week after Shia Muslim extremists freed him from almost 19 months in captivity. Jenco, 51, was kidnaped in Beirut, where he headed Catholic Relief Services.

Speaks at Theater

After the motorcade, which took more than 70 minutes to travel about four miles, Jenco and his family--who filled three buses in the procession--went to Joliet’s Rialto Square Theater, a massive, restored 1920s movie palace. Here, there was an official welcome home on a podium crowded with politicians and priests.

Jenco, who has said little about his days in captivity, spoke for the first time of the despair that sometimes gripped him. “There were many days during those months of confinement that I felt no one cares, not my family, order, church, CRS (Catholic Relief Services),” Jenco said.

Two of his captors, he added, asked him for forgiveness and he said that in his final hours as a hostage he was given a small cross to hold.

Jenco asked for prayers for Lebanon and the Middle East and for the three remaining hostages--Terry A. Anderson, 38, chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press; Thomas Southerland, 55, the American University’s acting dean of agriculture, and David P. Jacobsen, 55, director of the American University Hospital in Beirut.

Dornan Praises Assad

Among those at the homecoming was California Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), who praised the role Syrian President Hafez Assad played in Jenco’s release and in the freeing of other American hostages in the Middle East.

He asked the crowd welcoming Jenco to “transfer your love, pour attention onto President Assad so he can come through for us and with three more hostages.”

Dornan also said two other American hostages were “brutally murdered” by their captors, “one of them tortured to death.” He was referring to William Buckley, 58, a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon who was kidnaped on March 18, 1984, and Peter Kilburn, 61, a librarian at the American University. He was kidnaped on Dec. 3, 1984.

In addition to Jenco, one other hostage has been released and one escaped.

Attacks Kadafi

Earlier, in Chicago, Dornan charged that Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi had offered $1 million for Jenco’s death, apparently in retaliation for the U.S. bombing raid on Libya last April 15.

Dornan told NBC News a State Department official told him that Kadafi also had offered $1 million for the lives of Kilburn and British citizens Philip Padfield and John Leigh Douglas. The three, who had been held by Muslim extremists, were found dead east of Beirut two days after the U.S. raid.

Kadafi “bought those three people so he could murder them in response to our April 14-15 raid,” Dornan charged. “I’ve never heard of that since the Middle Ages, purchasing someone to kill them, to make a political point.”

State Department spokesman Joe Reap in Washington had no comment on Dornan’s accusation.

Jenco said the massive welcome he got was not the homecoming he imagined in captivity.

“I thought they would drop me off on a street in West Beirut. I would go to a hotel, buy a ticket, sneak on a plane and end up at 210 Ross St., Joliet, Ill.,” he said.

There was no way Jenco could have sneaked back to town on Saturday.