Praise the Lord and pass the pizza sauce

This was a front page story in the Scranton Times. Really.

Scranton Times

When Mary Louise Salerno saw Jesus Christ in a bucket of pizza sauce, her instinct was not to alert the media or even to tell many friends.

She did not want people descending on her family's West Scranton pizzeria, and she did not want to invite critics or doubters of what she felt was a clear sign.

"To us, it was something special," Ms. Salerno, 65, of Old Forge said. "God smiled on us that day."

The image of Jesus has a history of unexpected appearances, from rocks and windows to medical X-rays and a tortilla. Add to that a sauce bucket at Brownie's Famous Pizzeria, a long-standing eatery on Luzerne Street. It happened on the first Friday of Lent.

Ms. Salerno was at Brownie's and talking with her granddaughter, 23-year-old Jackie Krouchick, while she made a pizza. Her granddaughter is a single mother who she said is struggling through tough times. Ms. Krouchick told her grandmother she worried she was losing her faith.

As Ms. Salerno poured tomato sauce from a white plastic bucket, she urged her granddaughter to keep believing. That is when she saw it, the image of a man with long hair and a beard in the leftover sauce.

Bill Salerno, the owner of Brownie's and brother of Ms. Salerno, said he was skeptical until he saw it for himself. Maryann Marsico, who works at Brownie's, said even an atheist would find it unmistakable.

"My 2-year-old grandson knows who it was. ... He just looked at it and said, 'That's Papa Jesus,' " Ms. Marsico said.

It was not lost on Ms. Marsico that Jesus appeared at Brownie's at the start of Lent, a holy Christian time that also happens to spur pizza sales because observers are not supposed to eat meat on Fridays.

"I will never cheat and eat meat again," she said.

The bucket was placed in a cooler for a while, and a family friend insisted on taking a video of the image, which was posted on YouTube. On Wednesday, though, Brownie's washed the bucket out with Ms. Salerno's permission.

The message had been delivered, she said, and she did not want the image of her Lord "just sitting there in a pizza place."

Mr. Salerno, 55 and also from Old Forge, said he is not a churchgoing man but he is religious, and seeing Jesus on that pizza sauce bucket was all the proof he needs.

"Jesus is everywhere, even in a little pizzeria in West Side," he said.