WORCESTER – A priest’s dream came true this spring, when information he’d collected for decades was made accessible online.
This digitized material is part of The Deaf Catholic Archives at the College of the Holy Cross and can be found at crossworks.holycross.edu/dca.
The whole archives, of which Jesuit Father Joseph Bruce is founder and curator, is available to the public at Dinand Library on the Worcester college campus. It includes newsletters, scrapbooks, periodicals, conference material, publications, photographs, ephemera, books, and audiovisual recordings from parishes, Catholic schools for the Deaf, regional organizations for Deaf Catholics, and other institutions across the globe, according to Holy Cross.
The digitization of key components of these archives was supported by a $258,511 Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the non-profit, independent Council on Library and Information Resources, the college reported. The grant program was made possible by funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation from June 1, 2022 to May 31, 2024.
There is no other collection quite like this known to those working with it, said Lisa Villa, who was Holy Cross’ digital scholarship librarian during the project and is now the college’s public services and engagement archivist. A member of Sacred Heart-St. Catherine of Sweden Parish, she said there are other archival collections in the United States about the Deaf, but not necessarily about Deaf Catholics. Photo courtesy of the College of the Holy Cross
Father Joseph Bruce, SJ, founder and curator of The Deaf Catholic Archives holds on to a box of materials in between shelves filled with the collection at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, where the archives are kept. “We want people to know about it as a resource and so the Deaf community has access to their own history,” she said. “They have this beautiful and rich culture of practicing their faith.” The archives, which enables others to see that, can also aid those who want to minister to them.
Last July, people attending a conference in Boston for Deaf Catholics came here to learn about the archives.
“One person jumped up” upon seeing his hometown in a photo, delighted with a reference to the Deaf there, Mrs. Villa said. “Seeing that person’s excitement let us know how important the work we were doing was.”
The collection features deaf and hearing individuals and institutions that served the deaf, who were somewhat marginalized, by helping them study and practice their faith, and be recognized as persons, said information from the college.
Through the Digitizing Hidden Collections grant more than 17,000 items with a total of about 100,000 pages were put online, Mrs. Villa said. She said people in at least 130 countries have accessed this, and others have looked at the physical archives, which includes materials the college does not have permission to put online.
“Father Joe had this dream” to have the archives digitized, Mrs. Villa said. “This was one of the highlights of my career” to help him with this project that was meaningful to him, “to see the joy this brought” him. “How often do you get to make somebody’s dream come true?”
They’re both “Holy Cross alums” – Father Bruce, a 1973 graduate and Mrs. Villa a 1990 graduate. Though she didn’t take his American Sign Language and Deaf culture classes as a student, “he taught me to sign ‘Silent Night’ for a Christmas Mass,” she said.
“I have the deepest love and admiration for Father Joe,” she said. “He is a priest through and through. ... It’s evident in the way he treats the Deaf community” and everybody. She said she hopes one of his legacies will be The Deaf Catholic Archives.
“We knew about a grant for digitizing hidden collections,” and applied for it, Mrs. Villa said. In addition to her, the grant team included Abby Stambach, Holy Cross’ head of archives and distinctive collections, and Corinne Tabolt, an assistant no longer working for the college. Father Bruce was a consultant, she said.
Mrs. Villa said they had a vendor scan the material, which students then uploaded onto the college’s institutional repository.
“We hired a project archivist – Lenora Robinson,” who managed the whole process, and is now Holy Cross’ digital initiatives archivist, she said.
Mrs. Villa said that collecting and digitizing of new donated materials about Deaf Catholics continues.
There are still places that would discard such material, partly because some people don’t see the value of information about the Deaf Catholic community, Father Bruce said. But he said he feels that, with the digitization, people can see the archives’ value.
“I feel like I’ve really achieved something,” he said.
Rescued English-language materials help start Deaf Catholic Archives at the College of the Holy Cross
WORCESTER – An unwanted international trip and an encounter with a secret trash-picker led to what became The Deaf Catholic Archives at the College of the Holy Cross.
How the archives got here is a story told – verbally, and with gestures and sign language interpreters – by its deaf founder and curator, Jesuit Father Joseph Bruce, 76, who now lives with Jesuits in Boston and comes to Holy Cross to work with the archives.
After making his first vows, he lived in a community at Boston College. Living with them was a member of the Brothers of St. Gabriel from Madagascar, who “begged me to drive him to Montreal,” where the brothers’ closest community was.
“Of course, I said, ‘No,’” Father Bruce recalled.
That changed after the brother told him there was a community of Deaf sisters in Montreal. There Father Bruce met Sister Elizabeth Kass, from Dubuque, Iowa. It was 1977.
“The day before I left Canada, she asked me if I would bring some boxes back home to the states,” he said. “In those days, people never said ‘no’ to sisters.”
The Quiet Revolution of the 1960s had brought rapid social and political change to French-speaking Quebec. English-language materials were being discarded, “so the hearing sisters went through the Deaf sisters’ library” and threw out everything in English, which upset the American sisters, Father Bruce said.
“Sister Elizabeth went through the trash and collected all the things [related to the Deaf] that were thrown away,” he said. “She hid them under her bed and in the closet.” She wanted Father Bruce to read these books, magazines, and newsletters from schools for the Deaf.
Did he read them all?
“Of course not!” But he took them home.
“What am I going to do with all this?” he asked a Jesuit who’d directed a publishing house. “They’re very valuable,” the priest responded, and gave him a filing cabinet.
In 1974, Father Bruce had received materials about Deaf Catholics from Mary Garland, whom he’d met when visiting deaf people in Framingham. He said he tried to return them, but she gave him more instead. He planned to discard them, but sensed he shouldn’t.
He also kept newsletters containing mailing addresses of people ministering to Deaf Catholics, since, “back in those days, there was no way for me to use the phone” to contact them.
A deaf woman told him it was important to keep these materials, and wanted to help him acquire more. She and another deaf woman worked with him with the collection.
“The three of us invented a way of saving everything” – storing newsletters in binders – Father Bruce said. “That is not what professional archivists do. You are supposed to put them in acid-free folders,” which the three hadn’t heard of.
He said they sought more things about Deaf Catholics – materials not important to other people then. They called their collection The Deaf Catholic Archives “because it sounded more professional,” hoping to elicit donations to defray the cost of things such as binders and postage that they were paying for themselves.
In the early 1980s, when Father Bruce was based at Campion Center in Weston, where Jesuit archives were kept, his archives were moved there. And when he moved to Holy Cross College in 1985, he took his archives there.
When the Jesuits were to move out of Loyola Hall, where the archives were stored, Father Bruce said he and his helpers wrote to about 100 colleges and religious organizations asking if they would take the collection. Three agreed to.
One morning at breakfast, Jesuit Father John E. Brooks, then Holy Cross’ president, said to him, “You look awful; what’s been bothering you?”
The collector explained that he needed to decide what to do with his archives. He said Father Brooks, like most of the Jesuits, didn’t know the archives existed.
“He was curious and he asked to go take a look,” Father Bruce said. “So, we left our breakfast” and looked at items in the 15 filing cabinets, where “everything was in order.” Father Brooks said three Jesuits who worked with the Deaf were buried in the Jesuit cemetery at Holy Cross. (Now there are four, Father Bruce said.)
The two priests returned to breakfast and Father Brooks asked, “Can you give [the archives] to Holy Cross?” Father Bruce said that the Holy Cross archives were no good.
Lisa Villa, now Holy Cross’ public services and engagement archivist, told The Catholic Free Press the college’s archives space was not up to professional standards, but Father Brooks told Father Bruce that fundraising was to be done to renovate it.
Father Bruce said he felt a little overwhelmed at Father Brook’s request and replied that he needed to contact his helpers in order to make a decision.
“The two of them said, ‘Go for it!’” Father Bruce recalled. They’d been considering donating the archives to the University of Notre Dame in Indiana but had no money to rent a vehicle to take them there.
He said Father Brooks was very happy they gave the collection to Holy Cross in 1990. His “thank you” note is even in the archives.