Court Case Seeks to Define a Catholic Priest's Family


By WILLIAM GLABERSON

 

hile the Rev. Lawrence Martin Jenco, a Roman Catholic priest, was
held by Islamic radicals for nearly 19 months in Lebanon in the
1980's, his relatives back home in Joliet, Ill., felt the anxieties
shared by all the hostages' families.

 "It was almost as though my own right arm was torn off," John M.
Jenco, one of Father Jenco's nephews, remembered recently.

 Now, 15 years after Father Jenco was released and 5 years after he
died of cancer in Illinois at age 61, a federal court in Washington
is about to decide a suit by the Jenco family seeking hundreds of
millions of dollars from the Islamic Republic of Iran for financing
and directing the captors.

 Because of arguments advanced by the family's lawyers, the court
is facing a surprising question that ventures into complicated
religious and cultural territory: Who should the courts consider to
be the "family" of a Roman Catholic priest?

 To tally damages, the Jenco family's lawyers urged the judge to
consider the emotional ties that bound nieces and nephews to Father
Jenco, who as a Catholic priest did not have children of his own.

 "Aren't the children of a Catholic priest's brothers and sisters
his alter-ego children?" one of the lawyers, Steven R. Perles,
asked in an interview.

 After a trial this spring, a decision is expected soon from Judge
Royce C. Lamberth of Federal District Court.

 The Rev. Raymond C. O'Brien, a priest who is a law professor at
the Catholic University of America in Washington, said, "The case
pushes the envelope toward the position that a priest, under a vow
of celibacy, could have formed emotional connections with other
people so they can benefit from legal recognition of that
relationship."

 Father O'Brien, the author of a family-law textbook, said he knew
of no other case posing a question like the one in the Jenco case.

 Judge Lamberth signaled recently that he was focusing on the
question by asking the lawyers for a brief dealing specifically
with the question of whether the nephews and nieces should be
considered family for the purpose of computing damages.

 The Jencos' suit was filed under a 1996 federal law permitting
suits against countries that sponsor terrorism.

 In a 1998 case under that law handled by the same lawyers who are
representing the Jenco family, Judge Lamberth ordered Iran to pay
$247.5 million to the family of Alisa M. Flatow, of West Orange,
N.J., who was studying at a seminary in Jerusalem in 1995 when she
was killed in a suicide bus attack for which Islamic Holy War, a
militant group with ties to Iran, claimed responsibility.

 Last year, Terry A. Anderson, one of Father Jenco's fellow
hostages, won a judgment of $341 million. Last week, Judge Lamberth
ruled that Iran should pay $352 million to another former Lebanon
hostage, Thomas Sutherland, and his family.

 Terrorism victims who win such suits can collect tens of millions
of dollars from Iranian assets frozen in this country. The value of
the Iranian property is disputed, but estimates range from $450
million to $1.5 billion.

 The question of who constitutes a priest's family arose because
the 1996 law gave relatives of the victims of terrorism the right
to claim damages for their grief and suffering. But the provision
did not define who is eligible and who is not. It simply permitted
solatium, a Latin term that describes damages for hurt feelings or
grief.

 In other kinds of cases, courts have limited such awards to direct
nuclear-family members of those who were injured: parents, spouses,
children or siblings.

 Judge Lamberth appears likely to approve claims filed on behalf of
Father Jenco's six brothers and sisters. But it is not clear
whether he will agree with the family's lawyers, Mr. Perles and
Thomas Fortune Fay, that Father Jenco's 22 nieces and nephews
should also be compensated. Iran did not send lawyers or present
any defense in the case.

 It is the fact that priests do not have their own children that is
the basis of the lawyers' contention that a priest's family ought
to be defined especially expansively. If Father Jenco were not a
priest, some legal experts say, nieces and nephews would be
unlikely to win damages.

 Courts have limited the categories of people who can recover
damages for their responses to other people's injuries because
judges feared an endless number of suits, said Marshall S. Shapo,
an authority on personal injury law at Northwestern University.

 "The line will always be drawn at family," Mr. Shapo said. "The
question is, Are you going to leave it at immediate family or are
you going to extend it to nieces and nephews in the case of a
priest?"

 Some lawyers argue that the legal system should not expand the
categories of people who may recover damages unless Congress does
so explicitly.

 "I would be uncomfortable with a court extending the definition of
family in this case - notwithstanding the sympathy one has with a
priest and his nephews and nieces," said Michael Heise, a law
professor at Case Western Reserve University.

 But Mr. Fay, the Jencos' lawyer, said Congress included grief
damages in the 1996 law because terrorists try to provoke anguish
in relatives as a way to pressure the United States government.

 In other hostage cases, Mr. Perles said, lawyers have gradually
widened the circle of people entitled to grief damages. One case
awarded damages to siblings of a young woman killed by terrorists;
another awarded damages to a child born before a hostage's
marriage.

 Mr. Fay, who with Mr. Perles drafted the damages provision passed
by Congress, said the law's vagueness was intentional "because we
wanted to have the widest interpretation possible."

 Church law is unlikely to be much help to Judge Lamberth. The Rev.
D. Reginald Whitt, an expert on canon law who is a law professor at
the University of Notre Dame, said the family relationships of
priests were in an area of legal ambiguity. That is especially true
of priests in orders that require vows of poverty, like the Friar
Servants of Mary, to which Father Jenco belonged.

 Canon law once declared people who took such vows dead for civil
legal purposes so their family relationships were terminated as if
by death, Father Whitt said. More modern interpretations have left
the relationships of priests to their natural families somewhat
undefined.

 Conflicts arise periodically, for example in battles over the care
of terminally ill priests. In those cases, Father Whitt said, the
church often defers to the natural family, although the "religious
family" of the order often believes it would have a superior legal
claim.

 In interviews, several of Father Jenco's nieces and nephews
remembered their close family ties.

 David G. Mihelich, 40, a nephew, said that in blue-collar Joliet
it was an honor to have a priest in the family. When Uncle Larry
would come home from his Catholic Relief Services missions around
the world, some of the nieces and nephews said, his special
connection to them was clear.

 "No matter what you did, he still loved you," Mr. Mihelich said.


His cousin, John M. Jenco, 43, a biopharmaceutical researcher at
Stony Brook, N.Y., said that when his uncle would come home, there
was always a period of respectful quiet, followed by an exuberant
water-balloon fight.

 Father Jenco died in 1996 before the suit was filed, so there was
no testimony from him. But in a 1995 book, "Bound to Forgive," he
wrote that while he was in captivity, intermediaries delivered a
letter from his nephew David. He reread it "a thousand times," he
wrote. Once, he said, he heard his nephew John being interviewed on
the radio, and hearing the interview was important in "encouraging
me to hang on."

 During his 564 days of captivity, Father Jenco wrote, he had a
dream of walking through the door of a sister's kitchen in Joliet.
In a sense, the book was his testimony about the importance of the
family back in Joliet. "As a hostage," he wrote, "I only wanted one
thing: to go home."

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/06/national/06PRIE.html?ex=995427689&ei=1&en=d49063ba290bea84