Corpus Christi, Texas, Feb 21, 2009 / 14:16 pm
When Father Tom Coughlin began seriously considering a priestly vocation in high school, little did he realize how long and winding the road would be to becoming the first deaf priest ordained in the United States.
Fr. Tom began applying to various seminaries after he graduated from high school, but was turned down from one after the other due to the fact that he is deaf. Instead, he went on to study and graduate from Gallaudet University in 1972 with a BA in English and then in 1976 obtained his MA in Religious Studies from Catholic University. He entered the Trinitarians in 1972 and was finally ordained by Cardinal Lawrence Sheehan of Baltimore in 1977.
He met with so much opposition before and after ordination that he almost quit, explained Fr. Tom to Sr. Lou Ella Hickman of the South Texas Catholic Newspaper. “Most people were not prepared to welcome a deaf person. I was all alone, but the vocation director Father Joseph Lupo told me ‘You have to open the door. You have to suffer so others won’t.’ And I saw his point. Following Christ you have to make sacrifices. One has to enter the mystery of suffering in order to pray better. Mary, Joseph, the apostles all suffered but they understood the meaning of God’s love.”