BEIRUT: The Rev. Lawrence Martin Jenco, a Roman Catholic priest who has devoted his life to serving the poor and dispossessed of the world, accepted the dangers working in war town Beirut where he was kidnapped 19-months ago.
Jenco 51, a member of the Service order that works in schools and hospitals throughout the world, was released Saturday in Lebanon by pro-Iranian Islamic Jihad.
For 25 years, Jenco worked as a missionary in Rome, Thailand, North Yemen, India and Australia before he was sent to head the Catholic Relief Services offices in Lebanon in September, 1984. There, Jenco was kidnapped Jan, 9, 1985, while being driven to work.
Jenco, known as Father Martin, was an “individual very concerned about the poor and underprivileged”.
As a child, he was a favorite of the nuns and priests at St. Bernard Catholic Church in Joliet where he attended church and grade school, she said,
At the parish, he served a childhood apprenticeship as “an altar boy, cleaner-upper, dishwasher and jack-of-all trades,” she said.
When he arrived in Beirut, Jenco helped set up hospitals and schools and aided residents in trying restoring some order to a city shattered by the civil war.
“We know he was under a great deal of tension, that was clear from his letters, but he made a commitment and it was his job,” Mihelich said.
Jenco, who suffers from high blood pressure, was the only occupant for several months in his Beirut apartment building, Atherton said,
“Fear drove away everyone ~ from an apartment building where he lived, but he still lived there alone,” Atherton said. “He wrote me that he had only five hours a day of electricity and would be without light for hours upon hours each night. His only activity was to go from his apartment to his office’.
The Christmas before he was kidnapped, Jeco wrote his family “The innocent victims are mostly with the setting sun”.
Article extracted from this publication >> August 1, 1986
