While 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."