Appalachian Apostle

By Fred Mogul/Shenandoah

Since October, the bearded man in a white robe has wandered around this depressed coal region in Pennsylvania, where people tell stories about him. Children seem to believe he can walk in a snowstorm without getting wet and that his robe never gets dirty. One man phoned a local newspaper to say the visitor had put his palms on the hood of the man's car and fixed a problem that would have been too expensive for him to repair. The bearded man smiles at these stories and says he mostly tries to discourage them. Mostly. "There have been some real miracles," he says.

Perhaps the soul searching in the towns of Hazleton and Shenandoah is one of them. The man knows his vow of poverty, his itinerant ways and his Jesus robes have provoked some quiet scorn and loud questions. But he is determined to channel this curiosity into introspection. Even the name he gives is a question: "What's Your Name?" It is, he says, the question Moses asked God at the burning bush. He says he wants people to reflect on "the deep mystery of [God's] name and the union between his name and our names." Personal queries are parried with biblical quotes: "Who is my mother? Who is my brother? All of you who do the will of my Father are my brothers."

What's Your Name? and this largely Catholic corner of Appalachia have never seen anything like each other. People know his real name. A local paper discovered he had been arrested, and released, in Ohio for preaching to a crowd that became unruly when the police tried to break it up. The record had him as Carl J. Joseph, 39. Still, people here respect his wish to be addressed as What's Your Name?

Although he claims to have traveled on foot through 13 countries and 47 states since 1991, Joseph says he has never stayed in one area as long as he has here (his driver's license record had him intermittently in Toledo, Ohio, and the Bronx). As many as 2,000 people at a time have come to hear him speak. They have gathered out in the fields to pray through the night. They have stopped him on the street to talk one on one, unburden themselves of problems and ask for his prayers. They have called in to a local cable talk show that put him on the air four times in two months.

"Seven phone lines busy all the time! I've done telethons, and I've never seen anything like it," says TV producer Sam Lesante. Joseph and Lesante credit the shows with extending Joseph's mission. "Look, you get on the Sammy Lesante Show once a year, you're lucky--never mind four times in two months. But the demand was there, and it's just been incredible." says Lesante. The Associated Press has since carried the story nationwide.

When Joseph first arrived in Hazleton, the Rev. Gerard Angelo, pastor of the National Shrine of the Sacred Heart, asked to see him and was persuaded of Joseph's sincerity. "I wanted to make sure he wasn't a nut," says Angelo, whose shrine draws 100,000 pilgrims a year. He says he checked out Joseph's background but is keeping mum to maintain the preacher's mystique. He says, however, that the bishop has given his blessing.

Joseph says he is catholic only in the sense of "universal." Still, What's Your Name? speaks of the need to heed the authority given by Jesus to the bishops and the Pope. Joseph is reluctant to indulge the "witnessing" common among certain Protestant services. When a woman talks about a vision of angels, or a man talks of being reborn, he cautions against self-centeredness and says fealty to Jesus is the central point of prayer. Asked to sing Ave Maria, he resists at first but then hushes a room with a sonorous baritone. A woman mutters, "I don't care who he says he is--you only learn to sing that way from nuns."

A whiff of disingenuousness clings to him. He has chosen homespun robes, he says, because they make "the most sense" and help avoid a textile industry that "enslaves its workers." Still, living much as Jesus did--declining money and subsisting on charity--is key to winning supportive friends. Says Connie Muir, whose daughter and son-in-law housed him for two months last fall: "He speaks to the deepest part of your soul." And Joseph sees possibilities in this land of shuttered mines. "There's a faith waiting to come out. It's like a beautiful heart is under there, but the coal dust has settled and needs to be brushed away."