The earliest Deaf Church – Catholic
Pedro de Luna – known as Benedict XIII maintains that deafness brings one closer to God in his Book of Consolations of Humans Life.
Also, there was another detail about the manually coded language before 1200. Monks who took vows of silence, for example, were known to communicate using fingerspelling, and the Venerable Bede (672-735 CE) famously recorded a system for spelling and indicating numbers on the hands.
The Last Chapter
Deaf nun and author – Teresa de Cartagena wrote many books including Grove of the Infirm (note the nun uses the metaphor of an isolated island in framing deafness as an illness.) 1425-?
Her quote here – ““When I look at my suffering in temporal terms,
it seems very painful…but when I turn my thought
from these concerns…I see the solitude
that my suffering [brings]…I call it a kind…
and blessed solitude…[it] isolates me
from dangerous sins and surrounds me
with sure blessings…”
DON PEDRO VELASCO DE TOVAR of Spain, a student of Don Pedro Ponce de Leon, the sixteenth-century Benedictine abbot and teacher of the deaf. (https://wordandsign.com/tag/don-pedro-velasco/ ) and his brother Don Francisco de Velasco. The 1540s by Don Pedro Ponce de Leon.
Previously, scholars only mentioned what might be considered a bit of gossip, that a servant of the House of Velasco confirmed that Don Pedro Velasco was certainly a priest who celebrated mass in the estate’s chapel [see T. Labarta de Chaves and J. Soler, Sign Language Studies 5(1974):52]. He would have done this by voice in Latin, as this was the requirement at the time, and Ponce de Leon was known for teaching the deaf to speak. However, scholars also indicate that Velasco used sign language extensively as his first language.
Fr. Charles Jean-Marie La Fonta C.Ss.R, France – (1878 – 1927)
Fr. Charles la Fonta’s quote showed here. “
“Dear Lord, I will be your priest. I shall also be the deaf-mutes’ priest, teach them your commandments, and lead them on the way to you.”
https://medium.com/19th-century-deaf-people/a-mute-orator-madness-1feb961ea1ac
There is a book I will like to obtain and to read about his biography. The book is called Un Miracle de la Foi. Un Sourd-Muet Devenu Pretre — A Miracle of Faith, A Deaf-Mute Becomes a Priest, by Mme. Raoul de Chaunac-Lanzac (1930, Paris), and it is tough to find this book somewhere to access and obtain this book to my Deaf History collections.
Fr. Charles la Fonta peached and encouraged many Deaf worshippers to come to the Catholic Church from 1921 in Paris, France, after many years battling the rights to preach and understand religious ritual. Unfortunately, he was allowed to celebrate Mass privately, and his gospel works for teaching many Deaf people in the community, especially D/deaf children. Fr la Fonta died in 1929, and he was recognised by other Catholic parishes for allowing D/deaf people in the universal Catholic churches.
Why the prevailing opinions of philosophers and saints, the deaf and hard of hearing in the early Church, were excluded since they could not hear God’s word? Let’s explore in the next blog.
