Lawrence Jenco; Former Lebanon Hostage

Father Lawrence Martin Jenco, the Roman Catholic priest held hostage in Lebanon by Islamic radicals for 18 months in the mid-1980s, died Friday of cancer. He was 61.

Jenco had been undergoing chemotherapy for pancreatic and lung cancer. He died at St. Domitilla Church in suburban Hillside, where he was an associate pastor.

“He was my great friend and mentor and probably the nicest, sweetest and most holy man I’ve ever met,” said Terry Anderson, the former chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press, who was held captive with Jenco. “I think if anybody is prepared to meet God in complete confidence, it should have been Marty Jenco.”

Jenco was head of Catholic Relief Services in Beirut when members of a radical Islamic group snatched him from a city street in January 1985. He was freed in July 1986 after months of negotiations involving the Reagan administration, Shiite Muslim radicals and Anglican envoy Terry Waite.

“I’m not sure if I’m in heaven or if I’m home. I’m overwhelmed,” Jenco said during a homecoming parade in his native Joliet, Ill. In the week between his release and that parade, he visited Pope John Paul II, the archbishop of Canterbury and President Ronald Reagan.

Jenco spent time with his family in Joliet and then moved to Los Angeles to serve as campus minister at USC. He also spent time assigned to the Servite Order’s formation community in Berkeley.

“I’m very much at peace,” Jenco told a congregation in Fullerton’s St. Philip’s Catholic Church on Thanksgiving Day in 1986, which was also his 52nd birthday.

That fall, he told a group of veterans and former prisoners of war gathered in Long Beach that the key to his survival during the ordeal was “God’s word, God’s table and a marvelous sense of humor.”

“The first thing you do,” he said, “is sing. Then you cry. And, finally, you remain silent.”

In 1995, Jenco wrote a book on his captivity, “Bound to Forgive--the Pilgrimage to Reconciliation of a Beirut Hostage.”

In his book, Jenco wrote that he held no animosity toward those who kept him captive for 594 days. Instead, he said he wanted to return to Lebanon to visit the men who guarded him, sometimes brutally, sometimes gently.

“I forgive, but I remember,” Jenco wrote. “I do not forget the pain, the loneliness, the ache, the terrible injustice.”

Jenco also wrote of his six months in solitary confinement. He kept track of time by marking days with saliva in the dust of his prison walls, marking months with knots in a potato sack.

The priest recounted the day his captors tied explosives to his body. Another time, he saw a chain suspended from a ceiling and thought he was about to die.

Although his faith never wavered, he admitted that he told God, “I’m not Job, I want to go home now.”

Jenco was born in Joliet on November 27, 1934. He studied at Mount Carmel College in Canada, St. Joseph Seminary in St. Charles, Ill., and in Rome. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1959.

Before he headed to Beirut in 1984, Jenco’s ministry revolved around working with the poor, the mentally ill and the physically handicapped in several countries, including Yemen, Thailand and India.