Jimmy Akin

When I saw the headline on Zenit "Accommodating the Deaf," two thoughts flashed through my mind: (1) This has got to be one of Fr. Edward McNamara’s liturgy columns and (2) I wonder what Ed Peters’ response will be?

The first thought came from past experience in decoding Zenit headlines. The second came from the fact that Ed Peters is a canonist with particular knowledge of the deaf community and the Church’s relationship with it.

I was pleased, then, when I got an e-mail informing me of this piece on Ed’s blog in which he interacts with Fr. McNamara’s column.

Dr. Peters finds significant fault with Fr. McNamara’s column, and rightly so.

I won’t repeat all of Ed’s critiques of the column here, but Fr. McNamara was clearly writing out of his depth on this topic. He gave a well-meaning, off-the-top-of-his-head answer to the questions posed to him without displaying  familiarity with the relevant Church documents (e.g., papal documents giving permission to sign the Mass).

Ed doesn’t point this out in his response, but spending even a few minutes looking in the indices of common reference works would have turned up the very documents that Fr. McNamara needed.

Ed’s piece does a good job surfacing problems with Fr. McNamara’s column. It also raises a couple of issues on which I’d like to add a few thoughts.

1) One of the subjects Fr. McNamara treats is whether parishes should provide closed captioning of the Mass. Ed makes the point that this would not be preferred because, while deaf people might read the captioning, they could not give the proper liturgical responses in captioning, whereas they can give the responses (e.g., "And with your spirit") in sign.

This is a good point. I would add another reason why captioning would not be preferred. As Ed mentions, there is no agreed upon way to write American Sign Language or other sign languages (yet). The captioning that a parish could provide thus would default to whatever the local vernacular language is (e.g., English, French, Spanish).

The problem is: Giving deaf people captions written in English is not giving them captioning in their own language.

American Sign Language, despite its use in America, is not English. It has different grammar and different vocabulary. It may have certain loan elements from English, just as English has loan elements from French and German and Latin and Greek, but it is not English any more than English is one of its cognate languages.

While there are efforts, like Signing Exact English, to exactly represent English in signed form, this is not the standard language in the deaf community in America. American Sign Language is.

Deaf people may have different levels of skill in reading English, just as English speakers may have different levels of skill in reading Latin, but giving them captioned English is not the same as giving them translation into the vernacular sign language.

2) Fr. McNamara was also asked by his correspondent about the possibility of deaf people entering convents, monasteries, and religious life. In answering, Fr. McNamara focused substantially on the question of whether deaf people could be ordained to the priesthood (which is not the same thing, since one can be in a convent, a monastery, or religious life without being a priest).

Fr. McNamara makes the point that some individuals have physical limitations that prevent them from holding certain occupations, which is true, though he is unfortunately detained by the idea that the priesthood involves a great deal of time listening to people, before ultimately concluding that this is not an insurmountable barrier to the priesthood.

Ed points out the problems with Fr. McNamara’s answer here (e.g., there are a lot of deaf people out there who don’t have anyone to "listen" to them due to lack of priests skilled in sign languages), but I would raise a question in this area.

It doesn’t actually concern whether deaf people can be ordained to the priesthood. As Ed points out, the former canonical prohibition on this has been removed from the law and there are, indeed, people who are deaf and who have then been ordained (as well as hearing people who were ordained and then lost their hearing).

My question concerns not ordination and deafness but ordination and something that often goes along with deafness: muteness.

For someone to be ordained to the priesthood, he should be able to validly perform the functions of the priesthood, including the celebration of the sacraments. Indeed, if someone where physically unable to perform these functions it would raise a question (in my mind, at least) about the validity of his ordination, just as the antecedent, total, permanent, and incurable inability to perform the marital act would imply the invalidity of a marriage.

Now, the sacraments involve the use of certain formulas ("This is my Body . . . ," "This is the cup of my Blood . . . ," "I baptize you . . . ," "I absolve you . . . " etc.)

Christian Tradition has established that these formulas do not have to be delivered in a particular language. They can be in Aramaic, Greek, Latin, French, English, Russian, Igbo, or thousands of others. But all of those languages have something in common: They’re spoken.

Sign languages are not spoken, and we may here have a relevant difference.

If we look to the requisite matter of the sacraments, we find that there are restrictions on the types of matter, within broader categories, that can be used. Baptism has to be done not with any liquid but with water. The Eucharist must have not any food and drink but wheat bread and grape wine.

We might find that similar limits exist regarding the kind of language that is used in the forms of the sacraments. It might not make a difference what specific tongue you say them in–any more than it matters what kind of wheat or what kind of grape you use–but it might be necessary that you say them in a tongue–a spoken language.

If so then there would be a problem ordaining someone to the priesthood if that person is incapable of vocalizing at least the sacramental formulas needed for validity.

This is an area that I don’t think the Magisterium has yet entertained. Individual bishops may have ordained deaf people–who may have varying degrees of muteness–to the priesthood, but I don’t think that the Magisterium as an entity has yet considered the question of whether spoken language is required for sacramental validity–at least I am unaware of any place where it has weighed in on the issue–and I could see it going either way on the question.