Catholic Priest Held Hostage In Lebanon Dies Of Cancer

The Rev. 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 the radical Islamic Jihad snatched him from a city street in January 1985. He was freed in July 1986 after months of negotiations involving the Reagan administration, Shiite radicals and Anglican envoy Terry Waite.

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

Jenco described his months of captivity as boring. For most of his time in captivity he shared a 12-by-15-foot room with three others: Anderson; David Jacobsen, administrator of Beirut’s American University Hospital and Thomas Sutherland, the university’s acting dean of agriculture.

In his book, Jenco wrote he held no animosity toward those who held 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 don’t believe that forgetting is one of the signs of forgiveness. I forgive, but I remember,” Jenco wrote. “I do not forget the pain, the loneliness, the ache, the terrible injustice. But I do not remember to inflict some future retribution.”