By Paul J. Condra
The 50-year-old priest was shot in the back, during a March 12 Mass he was leading at his Lynbrook church. A parishioner, Eileen Tosner, 73, of Lynbrook, also was shot to death during the Mass. A suspect was arrested hours after the murders and charged in the shootings.
Penzes' funeral was held Friday at St. Agnes Cathedral in Rockville Centre. Even St. Agnes, the cathedral church of the diocese, didn't have enough space to accommodate the estimated 1,000 mourners who came to pay their last respects, to hear the eulogies, to view Penzes one last time and to bid him a fond farewell.
Even in the quiet loft, where members of the press were assembled, one eager woman who had no other place from which to view the service refused to leave until she was escorted out by police.
About 200 priests, vested in white and egg-colored robes, occupied the front benches of the church. The transepts were filled by Lynbrook firefighters who had transported Penzes to the hospital the day he was shot and the 514th Air Mobility Wing of McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, of which Penzes was a chaplain. He was also chaplain for the Lynbrook Police Department, whose members attended the funeral.
Before the service began, many of those who knew Penzes shared stories of their fallen friend.
Wendel Barnett, the 514th wing chaplain, remembered Penzes as a real adventure-seeker. Just last year, he found himself riding an elephant in Taiwan. The two were on a narrow precipice traveling over a mountain, just wide enough for the elephant to maneuver his large legs down the path. On one side, there was mountain, on the other, a sheer drop. Finally, the elephant made it over the pass and was headed down when it came face to face with another elephant going in the other direction. By some act of contorted fate, the two elephants safely passed each other on that narrow Taiwanese cliff.
He thought that was going to be the end of his life right there, Barnett said.
It would seem stories of Penzes' life could fill volumes. There was the time he shook the hand of Pope John Paul II and Russian leader Mikhail Gorbechev in the same day; the Laotian family he brought to America from that war-torn country; the Jets games he couldn't miss; and the broken arm he suffered from the Rev. Charles Keeney during a football game gone wrong.
It was 1969, said Keeney during the homily he delivered at the funeral, that very day before I knew his name I broke his arm.
What a journey, from a broken arm to this ... celebration of Larry Penzes into eternal life, Keeney said.
It was the one solace Keeney could offer the crowd of mourners and Penzes' family: that the slain priest was headed toward an eternal life with God.
Said one priest as he rushed off to vest before the funeral, It's terrible that this is the world we have to live in now.
Those that knew and loved Father Larry can only hope he has found a better place.
