By Thea Jarvis

The National Catholic Office for the Deaf held its annual conference in Atlanta this month, marking the second time the organization, a pastoral service for the hearing impaired, gathered its national membership together in the Southeast.

Some 150 NCOD members were on hand for workshops, speakers and liturgical celebrations designed to assist pastoral ministers in their work with the deaf. Forty-seven participants were hearing impaired. Canadians made up approximately one-sixth of the conference.

Archbishop James P. Lyke, OFM, was the main celebrant of the conference’s opening Mass Feb. 17. Members of the Silent Catholics of Georgia helped coordinate the conference on the local level.

The NCOD came to North Georgia, executive director Sister Nora Letourneau, SSJ, explained, because the group wanted to support emerging ministry to the deaf here. Because there is no officially assigned pastoral worker to the deaf in the archdiocese of Atlanta, ministry is an all-volunteer effort.

Most large metropolitan areas, Sister Letourneau said, have at least one full-time person to oversee deaf ministry.

“(Volunteers’) time is limited,” she said, and there is “so much more to be done.”

The archdiocese currently has six parishes which offer interpreted Masses. Once each month, Father Bill Hoffman, pastor of St. Michael’s Church in Gainesville, travels to Atlanta to celebrate Mass in sign language at Our Lady of the Assumption Church.

Ministry to the deaf began in the U.S. in 1836, when Sisters of Saint Joseph arrived in St. Louis from France. Two of those original Religious were teachers of the deaf, said Sister Letourneau.

This year’s conference focused on faith development, a theme that coincided with the completion of a five-year study on spiritual development of the deaf undertaken by the NCOD. Father David Creamer, SJ, main speaker for the conference, led the group in two days of discussion on the theme.

Conference workshops included sessions in American Sign Language for beginners and more advanced students, religious signs, youth ministry, spiritual journey and separated and divorced Catholics.

The annual conference, Sister Letourneau said, is a “time when pastoral workers come together to support each other.” Most minister alone, she pointed out, and few others understand what deaf ministry entails.

Jan Connelly-Goodwin, a parishioner of Christ Our Hope Church in Lithonia who was attracted to deaf ministry after taking a course in signing in 1980, said it was “exciting to know there are so many more deaf Catholic adults becoming actively involved in the church here.”

“We are trying to encourage deaf people themselves to be leaders, to be active,” she said. Ministry to the deaf involves empowerment, not just doing “for the deaf,” since they can so ably “do for themselves.”