Fr. Joe Coyle’s pioneering work in nurturing the faith of deaf Filipino Catholics continues to flourish.
By Fr. Seán Coyle

Mrs. Salvacion Valderrama Tinsay comes from a prominent Bacolod City family. Like many with her background in the Philippines, she might have become a doña, a term associated with living a life of privileged leisure. But instead, she is known as Tita Salving; tita is a term of affectionate respect similar to “Auntie.”

One reason she is known as Tita rather than as a doña is the late Columban Father Joe Coyle, who, in the late 1970s, worked in the isolated area of Hinoba-an.

It was there Fr. Coyle began to notice parishioners with the most isolating of all disabilities—deafness. He realized many deaf people here could not even communicate with their own families and sometimes took on the role of “village idiot.” There were no provisions in local schools for those who were deaf, blind or had learning disabilities. Most families were struggling simply to survive.

Columban Father Seán Coyle worked with these deaf students at one of the “Welcome Home” centers in the Philippines.

In 1985, Fr. Coyle moved to Bacolod City, where he and volunteers started Special Religious Education in Sign Language. Eventually, deaf high school graduates joined the class.

Tita had started helping Fr. Coyle in his work. She and others in her family had learned Sign Language from a deaf U.S. Peace Corps volunteer who had stayed in their home.

The work of Fr. Coyle, assisted by Tita and others, continued to spread:

--In 1986 and ’87, eight deaf and four hearing catechists taught deaf children Sign
Language in Bacolod City.

--Fr. Coyle organized a summer workshop in mime with the help of his hearing volunteers, including Marisa Salving, Tita’s daughter. The workshop enabled the deaf to express themselves through their hands and bodies, a practice that continues today as “The Little Theater of the Deaf.”

--In 1987, Fr. Coyle rented a home for children with disabilities from outside Bacolod City so they could study at the special education centers there. He called the center “Welcome Home,” and 12 students lived there. By the time a new “Welcome Home” center opened in 1989, there were 30 students.

Fr. Coyle’s death in December 1991 devastated everyone. Many thought it was the end of all his programs. No Columban priest was available to take his place.

The Movement Grows
But Tita picked up where Fr. Coyle had left off. In 1992, she organized the usual summer school for learning Sign Language, and I was one of the students. I began to celebrate Mass in Sign Language whenever I had the chance. My classmates included parents and siblings of young deaf people.

Later that year, Tita invited me to help her team give the first-ever retreat for deaf people in Bacolod City. I later assisted in a retreat in Iloilo and officiated at the wedding, held at “Welcome Home,” of a deaf couple.

Welcome Home and other programs for and with the deaf began to take off: a “Welcome Home” center was built in Kabankalan, and deaf people also participated in Mass at the Kabankalan cathedral each Sunday.

There are “Welcome Home” centers in three Philippine dioceses and on Negros. Tita Salving set up outreach programs in Bacolod City for children ages 2 to 7.

Columbans in three Mindanao cities have become involved in this ministry with the deaf. Fr. Dick Pankratz has an interpreted Mass every Sunday in his parish in Cagayan de Oro; Fr. Michael Sinnott and some laypeople have a program in Pagadian City; and Columban Sister Clement Sheehy is part of the Community of Hope in Ozamiz that gives the Catholic deaf a voice in the community there.

Involvement by the Catholic Church in the life of deaf Catholics is slowly improving in other areas too.

More seminarians, for example, are learning Sign Language, and a Belgian priest, Fr. Luke Moortgat CICM, has been tireless in his involvement with the deaf. Also, The Little Mission for the Deaf is an Italian congregation that has a mission exclusively to the deaf in Cebu and Manila.

Fr. Coyle likely was the first priest in the Philippines to work full time with the deaf. The sparks he and a few others lit in the Church have now spread to other centers. Tita Salving has been a central figure in spreading the flames. Many of the deaf are grateful to her for giving of herself totally to their development as independent people of faith.

She, in turn, is grateful to them, for she has become Tita Salving rather than a doña.

Fr. Seán Coyle of Ireland is the editor of Misyon, the Columbans’ mission magazine in the Philippines. The Welcome Home Foundation, Inc. website is www.welcomehomefoundationph.org.