Editor’s note: This is the final installment of the Sun’s three-part series remembering Msgr. Eugene M. Yennock.
By Tom Maguire
Associate editor
Was this Guess the Exit?
One day Msgr. Eugene M. Yennock told his caretaker, Nancy Iannolo, RN, that there was this restaurant “right off the exit … in Pennsylvania.”
Her perplexity echoes: Like what exit, Monsignor?
“They have really good homemade food,” he said.
“W-eh-eh-eh-ll, we found it,” Nurse Nancy recalled, “but it took a little bit of time; we’d get off one exit, get on. Go off one exit. … ‘Right off the highway. Right off the highway.’ We found it.”
He could be impish, that well-traveled monsignor who died at the age of 97 on June 6, 2023, after 73 years as a priest. But unlike his road trips, his vocation was no mystery. “I wanted always to be a priest,” he told Sun staffers in a chat at Francis House, a home for the terminally ill, 18 days before he died at Crouse Hospital during the time when smoke from Canada was apparent in Syracuse. “It is the incense he liked so much!” texted Dr. Maria Iannolo, Nurse Nancy’s daughter.
Msgr. Yennock had a nose for the working life too, even in his youth. As a sixth-grader at Our Lady of Pompei School on the Northside of Syracuse, he helped his brothers’ business of driving to Queens or Brooklyn, picking up a load of baskets or burlap bags and bringing them back and selling them. He made it to school on Monday morning, he recalled. “So I did all my work. But I also was able to work at the store (built by his father). And it didn’t do me any harm.”
A very clever dad
The family had four boys and four girls. The father, who came from Italy, was a “very clever man with a lot of talents” whose job was putting in concrete and asphalt roads for a private contractor; and using a machine, he printed “50 pounds cabbage” or potatoes or whatever on those burlap bags sold by his sons.
Eugene went from burlap bags in the early days to putting in 16-hour days seven days a week as principal of Oswego Catholic High School and also leader of a parish. “You gotta get funds,” he recalled, “and I had to repair the church, the rectory, the hall. … And then I also ran the high school with very little money.” Without money for a guidance counselor, he would take home a bunch of reports for kids who wanted to go to college. “You write a little note,” he said.
He wasn’t making a martyr of himself, he said — “I liked what I was doing.”
Exhaustion was the only reason he gave up that double duty and went to Endwell as a pastor. He wound up as the pastor at St. Daniel’s in Syracuse from June 1981 to June 2021.
His lifetime of work gave him perspective, such as his belief that a lot of people are willing to help you if you ask them. “I think you can prioritize,” he said. “And you can only do what you can do. I mean, you know, we’re all limited. And we should know our limitations and know our talents and follow that.”
One of Monsignor’s talents was singing. Nurse Nancy drove him to this year’s closing ceremony for 40 Days for Life in front of Planned Parenthood in Syracuse, and the monsignor sat in the car and prayed and sang into a microphone. He prayed that “this awful scourge [of abortion] will pass.”
Msgr. Eugene M. Yennock is shown last summer at the dedication Mass for the Father James Kennedy Room, a new entryway, at St. Rose of Lima Church in North Syracuse. Msgr. Yennock received Holy Communion in his last hours. He died June 6, 2023. (Sun photo | Tom Maguire)
‘A song in his heart’
“He always sang,” said Shannon Guy, RN, co-organizer of the Syracuse 40 Days for Life campaigns. “He always got us going with the song. He always had a song in his heart. Just amazing.”
And in her hospital work, she would see Monsignor coming in at all hours of the night. “And I’d say, ‘Monsignor, what are you here for?’ And he’d say, ‘I’m here to bless the new baby that was born. … Nine o’clock at night. And he was in his 90s, you know?”
Nurse Guy’s co-organizer of Syracuse 40 Days for Life, Jeanie Owens, said Msgr. Yennock “would pray for all the children in the womb, for all those involved with abortions and all those who are hurt by abortion. And he always prayed. One thing that really will always stick with me, he would always pray really from the depth of his heart; he would say, ‘Father, we’re sorry about the babies.’”
Other pro-life advocates who pray in front of Planned Parenthood will also miss the monsignor.
“I knew him from the pro-life community and he never forgot my name,” said Betsy Mostrom, who remembers his “very approachable, gentle spirit.”
Betsy’s husband, Jim Mostrom, another 40 Days for Life participant, said that even in his later years coming over in the car, Monsignor “meant a lot to us. … He really gave us a powerful witness and encouraged us all the time.”
“Powerful” defined the monsignor’s tennis style as well. Known to play tennis with him were Father Thomas Kobuszewski, the late St. Daniel’s Music Director Amanda Carnie, and John and Danielle O’Loughlin. John recalled: “What he loved to do is when you’d lob it back if he was at the net he loved to slam it down your throat at the net, and then he’d have this biggest grin on his face after he did it. It was the funniest thing. So … he wasn’t too priestly when he played tennis; he loved to win and we just had a lot of fun with him and we’re gonna miss him like hell. … Every other aspect of his life he was a saint but not at the net.”
The slamming monsignor was so crazed for tennis that he attended Wimbledon, the U.S. Open and the Australian Open. “We have the hat,” said niece Maria Scaravillo, of Syracuse. The only tennis major he missed was the French Open. He even knew French, his niece said.
Down for the housework
He also knew to help his sister Norma Yennock do housework when he was 8 or so. “We were best friends because he helped me,” said Norma, of Syracuse, who will be 102 on Aug. 26. “Who helps you with your housework but somebody who loves you.”
Norma is one of three sisters who survive from Monsignor’s four-boys, four-girls family. Her baby sister is Boston resident Sister Margaret Therese Yennock, 90, of the Franciscan Sisters. The other sister is Marge Cesta of Hollywood, Fla.
“My brother became a priest,” Sister Margaret said, “because the Franciscan Sisters taught him as a child: What will it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul? And when he heard those words, he decided then that he was going to be a priest.”
“I became a sister,” she said, “because of the simplicity and the humility that I saw in the Franciscan Sisters. … They had a lot of joy. And they were humble. … And I think my brother was a very, very humble man.”
The humble man was out to save souls, said his niece Maria Scaravillo, of Syracuse. And that’s what he said at his 97th birthday party when he spoke to all his nieces and nephews, she said, asking them to examine their souls.
Trips for Msgr. Yennock entailed not just the mystery eatery or the famous tennis stadium but also national parks, cathedrals and mission churches. Niece Maria said they went to the site for Saint Brother Andre in Montreal, Saint Joseph’s Oratory. She said Monsignor believed that Brother Andre (1845-1937) “cured him of his migraines when he was 33 years old. And he had had them for life. So he put his head on Brother Andre’s heart … and he prayed, and his migraines were gone. … Never had another one.”
The one pastor
Others also considered Monsignor a part of their family. St. Daniel’s Deacon Joseph Celentano was Monsignor’s deacon for 20 years, and Monsignor was the only pastor the deacon’s son, Father Christopher Celentano, ever knew.
“He was a model priest and a model pastor,” Deacon Celentano said of Monsignor. “He was someone who was totally in love with Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. And he conveyed that belief and spirit to his parish community.”
In his homily at Monsignor’s funeral Mass, Father Celentano said, “Let us once again turn our prayers to our Heavenly Father, that in his mercy and kindness, he may count Monsignor Yennock among the blessed in the saints in heaven.”
A man who used to livestream Msgr. Yennock’s Masses figures the Monsignor will stay at the job in heaven: “He’s gonna do magnificent things for people, just like a Padre Pio type.”
