COVID travel restrictions may help slow the virus’s transmission, but seafarers are suffering, Pope Francis notes. He has been offering his prayers and solidarity to those who work at sea and have been prevented from going ashore or have not been able to work. In a video message last month Francis gave a special message Read more
Seafarers are the forgotten essential workers. “We enjoy the goods and services they bring us all our waking hours, but we do not know what some suffer for us to do so,” said Father Jeffrey Drane, writing in the Marist Messenger. “A tough life is precisely the way it is for the 1.6 million seafarers Read more
The man phoning Doreen Badeaux had recently lost his wife. The two of them had been on a cruise to celebrate their anniversary, he told Badeaux, and it was during dinner one evening that they spotted the priest. They’d asked him to join them, and in introducing themselves, they shared that the wife was dying. Read more
International seafarers at the port of Auckland had some special Kiwi Christmas cheer last year thanks to four Catholic schools. The schools – St Leo’s, Devonport; St Joseph’s, Otahuhu; St Joseph’s, Orakei and St Mary’s, Ellerslie – made hundreds of hand-crafted Christmas cards for seafarers. These were given out on ships berthed in Auckland just Read more
LINABUAN SUR, the Philippines — When Eril Andrade left this small village, he was healthy and hoping to earn enough on a fishing boat on the high seas to replace his mother’s leaky roof. Seven months later, his body was sent home in a wooden coffin: jet black from having been kept in a fish Read more
CHIOS, Greece — The rickety raft made of empty oil drums and a wooden tabletop rolled and pitched with the waves while tied to the side of the Dona Liberta, a 370-foot cargo ship anchored far from land in the Atlantic Ocean off West Africa. “Go down!” yelled a knife-wielding crew member, forcing two Tanzanian Read more
To transport goods and products around the world, the global economy relies profoundly on the maritime industry supported by a workforce of around 1.2 million seafarers, who at sea and in the oceans, frequently facing the strong and powerful forces of nature, manage ships of all types and sizes. As ports are built far away from the Read more
The message for Sea Sunday from the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant Peoples reads as follows: This world of the sea, with the continuous migration of people today, must take into account the complex effects of globalization and, unfortunately, must come to grips with situations of injustice, especially when the Read more
Sea Sunday is the annual day of prayer for those who work at sea and in ports around the world, and their families. Away from family and friends for many months at a time, working long hours and navigating some of the world’s most dangerous stretches of ocean, seafaring can be a tough, lonely and Read more