The Chronicle of Higher Education: From the issue dated August 15, 1990
PORTRAIT
From Mideast Hostage to Campus Ministry: No Escape From Hatred
By Peter Monaghan
Los Angeles, California -- Four years ago, Shiite terrorists freed the Rev. Lawrence Martin Jenco in Lebanon, where he had been kidnaped and held hostage for 19 months. Today, as a Roman Catholic campus minister at the University of Southern California here, Father Jenco is thousands of miles from the roadside on the Syrian border where he was dumped -- "taped up like a mummy," he recalls -- and abandoned by the Islamic Jihad.
But he says he has not escaped a world where divisions among races, creeds, and cultures can explode at any time into violence and hatred. The University of Southern California and the neighborhood that surrounds it, he says, also face such conflicts, bred of bigotry.
On January 8, 1985, only six months into his job as director of Catholic Relief Services in Beirut, Father Jenco was seized in the Moslem sector of the city by the Islamic Jihad, a fundamentalist group that demanded the release of 17 terrorists imprisoned in Kuwait for bombing attacks.
Father Jenco was released on July 26, 1986, in what his captors said was a "final good-will gesture" prompted by their prisoner's heart problems.
After returning to the United States, he recuperated for a brief time before beginning a cross-country lecture tour for the Catholic Relief Services. He spoke about poverty, the lack of health care, violence, and other issues that plague the third world. He then took up a ministry in Portland, Ore.
In 1988 he was sent to USC by his order, the Servants of Mary, known as the Servites.
The Servites are responsible for the parish around USC and for the Church of Our Savior, where Father Jenco conducts Mass. Says the Rev. Ignatius Kissel, the prior provincial of the Servite order in Los Angeles: "He was chosen because of his interest in third-world issues and because he has put his concerns for the poor and disadvantaged on the line a number of times in various ministries."
"We thought," Father Kissel adds, "that he could share his international experience with students and possibly interest them to give of themselves to concerns of peace and justice around the world."
Father Jenco says his appointment surprised friends who were familiar with his varied career. In his 31 years as a priest, he has worked as a missionary in Australia, India, Mexico, Thailand, and Yemen. He also spent three years directing the training of seminary students at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Cal.
He has found a more diverse population here than his friends predicted. Generally, the students at USC are financially secure, Father Jenco says, but he has met many who are working their way through college.
While the majority of students are white, the neighborhood that surrounds the campus is racially mixed, poor, and troubled by violence that explodes from rivalries among youth gangs.
It is that violence that prompts Father Jenco to liken conditions to those he experienced in Lebanon: Just recently, he says, a Hispanic youth from the USC neighborhood was killed in a gang fight. Some students at the university, he says, are so insensitive to the origins of such conflict that they actually cheered the youth's death as his just deserts.
"That angered me," says Father Jenco. "We should not have cheered it. We should have knelt and wept."
At the Church of Our Savior, and at gatherings of students and other neighborhood youths at its meeting house, parishioners whose daily lives vary widely hear Father Jenco challenge the religious and ethnic biases that create divisions among people.
Since his release, Father Jenco has often talked about his ordeal to classes of USC students studying the Middle East. But he says he is rarely pressed for details by the students who come to gatherings at the meeting house at the edge of the campus, where Father Jenco lives and works, and who have taken the opportunity to get to know him.
"I've never shared my experience in Lebanon with them," he says. "I think the kids are proud of me, and I have a sneaking suspicion they do want to know about it, but they feel it might be an invasion of my privacy."
The lessons he learned in captivity are, instead, folded into his parish ministry and into his homilies. Sometimes, he says, he includes "certain things that touched me as a hostage."
One lesson he preaches concerns forgiveness, and it angers some of his parishioners, he says. He has found that many Americans consider it his duty to want retaliation against his captors. He says his religion teaches him "to utterly forgive, unconditionally."
"That doesn't mean you forget -- that's amnesia. Anger's a marvelous thing, but the Lord God says, `Be slow with your anger.' "
Father Jenco says one aspect of his freedom, and of the release of other hostages, does annoy him. He deplores the press attention to which the freed hostages have been subjected on returning to the United States.
"What insensitivity," he says. "Let the man look out the window. Don't put a microphone into his face." He asks that hostages be allowed the simple pleasure he most craved: to come home quietly to his brothers, sisters, and other relatives in Joliet, Ill. He recalls being untied after he was found by the road where his captors had dumped him. "I didn't move. I just wanted to look at the earth and the sky. To smell it. Those are the healing moments."
Now part of Father Jenco's assignment from his order is to counsel and support the families of hostages still held in Lebanon -- by visiting in times of crisis, for example. He returned from Lebanon with news of three other Americans being held by the Islamic Jihad: Terry A. Anderson, the chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press; David P. Jacobsen, director of the American University Hospital in Lebanon; and Thomas M. Sutherland, the university's acting dean of agriculture. Mr. Anderson and Mr. Sutherland are still hostages; Mr. Jacobsen lives in Huntington Beach, Cal.
After three decades as a missionary, Father Jenco tells many compelling stories of working with alcoholic aborigines in Australia and with lepers in India. Of his life here, he says: "It's kind of a normal existence." He provides food to the homeless and keeps the church and the meeting house running smoothly.
In sermons, classes, and gatherings, he also tells students that an education should be a springboard to good works. "Our earth is a holy earth and we're all responsible for it," he says. "If you're only in it for a paycheck, I think your education has misled you."
Copyright © 1990 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
