San Antonio ministry for the deaf destroyed by house fire
Father Thomas Coughlin looked past a strand of yellow caution tape Friday afternoon at the charred, collapsed roof and shattered windows of a spacious, two-story house in Castle Hills where men studying for the priesthood had lived and prayed together for 12 years.
The House of Studies for Deaf Seminarians, in north San Antonio, was the culmination of more than a decade of Coughlin’s work to find a place to train deaf Catholic priests. Whether deaf, hearing or hearingimpaired, its residents had communicated in American Sign Language; attended Our Lady of the Lake University, the Oblate School of Theology and other local schools; and served deaf people in San Antonio, Austin and around Texas.
On Tuesday night, a fire ripped through the nine-bedroom, 8,400square-foot home, displacing two men living there. The cause of the fire, which started around 9 p.m., is still under investigation, but the house has been declared a total loss.
Coughlin, the first deaf Roman Catholic priest ordained in North America, had founded the Dominican Missionaries for the Apostolates of the Deaf and Disabled. With the ministry expanding around the United States, he had put the house on the market, planning to use the sale proceeds to cr was home alone, sitting at a table in the dining area and talking to a brother in St. Louis when he smelled smoke, he said. He checked the other side of the house, then went outside, where he saw flames on the roof. eate an endowment to support the missionaries and the order’s efforts. Brother Alex Mary Nyangezi While one neighbor called 911, he and another neighbor grabbed a hose and tried to spray down the flames, Nyangezi recalled, pointing to the corner of the charred home where a green hose still sat Friday afternoon.
Firefighters arrived quickly and Nyangezi had hoped the house could be saved, but flames spread
rapidly, destroying the bedrooms and the communal areas where the seminarians had gathered to pray every morning and night.
“We’ll have to start again with nothing,” Coughlin said. “But I have a seed, a deep conviction, that there is hope for the future.”
Coughlin said he did not have homeowners insurance on the property, which was valued at nearly $870,000 by the Bexar Appraisal District. The order’s nonprofit arm is the listed owner. Coughlin had bought it for $560,000 in 2007, using money from the sale of another House of Studies in New York that was shut down in 2000, and from three other bequests to the Missionaries.
Coughlin launched what would eventually become the order in Yonkers, N.Y., in 1996 when he received donations to create a training program for deaf candidates at St. Joseph’s Seminary. In 2000, seminary and church leaders ended the program, and two years later, Coughlin moved the institute to Northern California. He formed the Dominican Missionaries for the Deaf Apostolate in 2004 and in 2007 relocated to San Antonio.
Coughlin, who was born deaf and speaks both orally and in sign language, said his goal is to attract and recruit men to the priesthood who want to serve deaf people. The Catholic Church does not support or train priests for that mission, he said, and the number of priests is declining overall. In the United States, the total has fallen from more than 45,000 in 2000 to 36,580 in 2018, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.
Coughlin’s religious order recruits deaf and hearing men who want to serve and preach in sign language, and the House of Studies in San Antonio has provided a communal life for them, he said. About 30 men have lived in the home since it opened in 2007.
Coughlin battled the Castle Hills City Council and Zoning Commission for months to open the home, because city ordinances prohibit more than three unrelated people living together in a single-family residence. He received a special-use permit in 2008 for the nine-resident house.
Everyone who lived there in the past decade communicated and prayed in sign language, and the home was equipped and designed for deaf residents, with both visual and audiovisual technology, Coughlin said. Residents provided interpreting services for Mass at local parishes, offered sign language lessons in a classroom at the house and ran a food bank for the area’s deaf community.
There are now similar programs in Illinois and Connecticut, and priests from the order serve in several other cities.
Nyangezi, who is not deaf but habitually signs while speaking, said he was called to the ministry to “give full access to the word of God to the deaf community.”
His intention is “to help those people to hear the word of God in their language,” he said, comparing it to the holy day of Pentecost, which celebrates followers of Christ “hearing the good news in their languages.”
Nyangezi is studying philosophy and theology at Our Lady of the Lake University, and the other student in the house attends the University of Texas at San Antonio. Both men have a year left to complete their degrees.
They’re staying in a hotel for now, and Coughlin said he plans to find them an apartment for the next year. He also has to find a way to pay for the demolition of what’s left of the house. Coughlin hasn’t set up a crowdfunding account but the order does have a website at dominicanmissionaries.org.
“This is all I have left,” he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a few folded dollars. “But I did not lose my hope. … You do not understand hope unless you experience something like this.”
Coughlin recited a verse from Proverbs: “Trust in God with all of your heart and lean not on your own understanding.”
“Why that happened, we cannot understand,” he said, gesturing to the house. “It’s part of the mystery of God’s plan. I hope something good will come out of it.”