September 10, 2025

By Keith Benman
Contributing Writer

On a recent Friday morning, 15 deaf adults at Camp Mark Seven in Old Forge used sign language to discuss the theology behind the religious icons they had been writing in the camp’s auditorium. It’s an active conversation conducted with hand signals, facial expressions and occasional laughter. At times it can get intense. The Holy Trinity, Lucifer and God’s divine light all come in for examination. The conversation is led by the camp’s founder, Father Thomas Coughlin, the first deaf person ever ordained a priest in the United States.

The enthusiasm and energy of that conversation, mainly carried out in silence, was familiar to Father Fernando Solomon Jr., who visited Camp Mark Seven on that recent Friday. From 2012 to 2014, he did summer internships there. Now, he was there to renew old friendships and receive inspiration for the new deaf ministry he is helping lead in the Diocese of Ogdensburg.

“It helped me to understand especially the deaf culture, the deaf people, and understanding them and working with them,” said Father Solomon of his summers at the camp. “It was a great help for me to learn, especially the sign language.”

Father Solomon and others say they are now able to use the valuable lessons they learned at Camp Mark Seven to benefit deaf Catholics at parishes around the Ogdensburg Diocese.

Jessica Brooks, the diocesan deaf ministry’s staff interpreter, said her own internship at Camp Mark Seven three years ago was transformational. At the time, she was finishing up her college studies in American Sign Language. Being immersed in the deaf community at the camp was completely different from classroom work.
“My experience, the very first day, it was very nerve wracking, definitely,” Brooks said.

But after one week of being immersed in the deaf community there, she felt fully confirmed in her calling.

“I felt really confident … that this was going to be my passion for a really long time,” she said. “Like ‘yup,’ this is what I really want to do.”

Over the past 40 years, Camp Mark Seven in Old Forge has achieved national prominence for its programs for deaf and hard-of-hearing children, youth and seniors and the hearing children of deaf adults. The camp located in the diocese largely through a stroke of good fortune: it’s founder, Father Coughlin, is from here.

Father Coughlin, a Malone native, founded Camp Mark Seven a few years after completing seminary with the Trinitarian order and being ordained in Baltimore. He immediately began to raise funds for a deaf ministry. And when he saw the closed Mohawk Hotel on Fourth Lake was available in a bankruptcy sale in 1981, he jumped at the chance to provide the deaf community with “a place it could call its own.”

The camp is one way of making the deaf “visible” to the hearing world, Father Coughlin said. Deaf ministries like the one in the Ogdensburg Diocese are another way. Expecting deaf people to come to church simply to sit in the pews at a Liturgy they can’t hear just doesn’t cut it anymore, Father Coughlin said.

“You need to preach the gospel to the deaf people in sign language,” he said. “You need to provide sacraments in sign language. You need to provide pastoral care in sign language. You need to help them become part of the church.”

The Diocese of Ogdensburg is now starting to do just that. The deaf ministry has a sign language interpreter on the altar every week at the 4 p.m. Saturday Mass at Notre Dame Church, in Malone. About 15 deaf Catholics have been attending the Liturgy there as well as a social hour afterward. The ministry also has sign language interpreters available for weddings, baptisms, funerals and other rites when requested.

Father Solomon said he has carried forward another important lesson from his days at Camp Mark Seven when it comes to deaf ministry.

“It’s not just for the deaf,” Father Solomon said. “It’s for the hearing also. It’s integrating and educating both. That’s the important thing.”

Sign language interpreters have been warmly welcomed at Masses in the diocese.

“The hearing people, they really appreciated when I started doing the signing Mass,” Father Solomon said. “They are surprised and amazed and they love it.”

Mission made possible

By Keith Benman
Contributing Writer

Father Thomas Coughlin credits his parents in Malone and the Sisters of St. Joseph with inspiring him to seek what was – for him, at the time – a seemingly impossible vocation: the priesthood.

Impossible, because Father Coughlin was born deaf. And until he was ordained a priest in Baltimore in 1977, no deaf person had ever been ordained a priest in the United States.

As a young man, several seminaries rejected him before he found a home with the Trinitarian order.

“I had to fight for it,” he said recently at Camp Mark Seven, the camp he founded to serve the deaf community in 1981. “Deaf people are invisible. The Church doesn’t know we’re here.”

Despite that, his parents, also deaf, attended daily Mass at Catholic churches in Malone. Often with them was Thomas, their three daughters, who could hear, along with members of their extended family.

Father Couhglin said it was his parents’ example of persistence in the face of great odds that influenced and strengthened his own faith. The spark to then follow a vocation to the religious life was lit by a Sister of St. Joseph at St. Mary’s School for the Deaf in Buffalo. There, his eighth-grade teacher gave him a book on the Cistercians, a contemplative order. The rest, as they say, is history.

Just four years after his ordination, he established Camp Mark Seven in Old Forge. In 1987 he was able to set up a training program for deaf seminarians at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, New York. That and other deaf ministries established by Father Coughlin in various dioceses planted the seeds for the formation of the Dominican Missionaries for the Deaf Apostolate in 2004. It was the first religious congregation founded for and by the deaf.

Father Fernando Solomon Jr., parochial vicar at St. Peter’s Parish in Massena, entered the Dominicans as a vowed member in 2009, after first having attending seminary in the Philippines. He was ordained a priest in the Diocese of Ogdensburg in 2021 by Bishop Terry R. LaValley. A hearing person who is fluent in American Sign Language, Father Solomon is now the chaplain for a newly established deaf ministry in the diocese.

Today, the religious congregation called the Castello Dominican Missionaries for the Deaf and Disabled Apostolates carries on the Dominican’s heritage of service to the deaf. Four of its missionaries were ordained to the priesthood in 2023-24. The congregation is now active in several dioceses around the United States and one in Haiti.