“I learned what it means,” explained a smiling Nyabasa after Mass.

Stocks was unable to say Mass in Toronto on the Feast of Christ the King because he was in Rome — one of 90 people invited by the Pontifical Council for Health Care Ministry to a Nov. 19-21 conference titled “Ephphata: The Deaf Person in the Life of the Church.”

While Toronto’s deaf Catholics were universally pleased to know that the Vatican is addressing the problems deaf people face in being included in the life of the church, some were distressed that it was the Pontifical Council for Health Care Ministry, not the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, hosting the conference.

“Deaf culture and health care ministry should be separate, not together,” Angelique Vitulli told The Catholic Register via a TTY telephone line. “It’s conflicting, both health care and deaf culture. Deaf culture has many traditions, abilities and many positives. Health care involves any problem.”

“I’m a little shocked that this is the department that this topic is under. That shocks me,” said Eileen Zahakos, a teacher at St. Raymond’s Catholic School program for the deaf.

Zahakos and Vitulli work together at St. Raymond’s. Vitulli is deaf and Zahakos hears.

While Toronto’s deaf Catholics are lucky to have Stocks and a chaplaincy that respects and cherishes deaf culture, they don’t feel entirely integrated into the life of the church, said Hughie MacEachern.

For many in the De Salles Chaplaincy Sunday Mass in the St. Stephen’s Chapel, a windowless converted office space hidden away on the second floor of an old office building, is far from convenient and just doesn’t feel like a real church, MacEachern said. Sunday Mass attendance has dwindled since the chaplaincy moved from Holy Name — an impressive turn-of-the-20th-century church on the Danforth.

“We need an actual church. We really want people to come.”

In his closing address to the conference in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI called prejudice and discrimination against the deaf “deplorable and unjustifiable.”

“I appeal to political and civil authorities, as well as international bodies, to offer the necessary support to promote, even in these (developing) countries, the needed respect for the dignity and rights of non-hearing people, and to promote with adequate assistance their full integration into society,” said the Pope.

The Rome-based Zenit news agency reports that Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi came away from the conference profoundly impressed with the depth of sign language as a medium to communicate the Gospel.

“It is a communication that comes from the depths and passes through an extraordinary commitment of love,” Lombardi told Zenit.