BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — On a balmy December evening, four Indian crew members, eager to go explore this Mediterranean city where their container ship docked for a few hours, turned for help to Stella Maris. It’s the largest of the faith-based organizations that minister to seafarers in hundreds of ports around the world.
“We just call them, they help us with everything,” from connecting with far-away families on video to changing currency to delivering small Christmas gifts, said second officer Sunit Kamal.
And they donate Bibles in different languages too, the 33-year-old added in the organization’s small lobby next to a statue of Mary, one of whose ancient titles is “star of the sea,” or Stella Maris in Latin.
Whether it’s offering religious services, helping address labor abuses, or something as practical as serving as a delivery spot for Amazon packages, faith leaders and volunteers don’t see their work as charity.
Rather, their ministry is a way of affirming the human rights of the seafarers who keep global trade moving, often for low wages and in harsh conditions far from most people’s view — even in such popular tourist hotspots as Barcelona.
“It’s all pastoral care because it’s to help a person in what they need as a person,” said Ricard Rodríguez-Martos, the Catholic deacon and former merchant marine captain who leads Stella Maris in Barcelona, where it’s supported by the bishops’ council. “Seafarers are used to being seen by the people on land as a piece of the ship.”
According to the United Nations, more than 80% of the volume of international trade in goods is transported on the seas, making seafarers crucial to consumer products from veggies to cars.
Founded more than 100 years ago in Scotland by a group of Catholic volunteers, Stella Maris is now present in more than 50 countries and 350 ports, from Barcelona to Buenos Aires, from Manila to Miami, said Tim Hill, national director of Stella Maris UK, the biggest national entity in the network.
“Our mission is to provide practical, pastoral and spiritual support to seafarers, fishers and their families of any creed,” Hill said. “We get presented loads of problems.”
The seafarers’ top concern is isolation — especially as stays in port are getting shorter and ships are increasingly ethnically diverse, leaving mostly male crews from places as different as the Philippines and Ukraine with little that’s familiar on extended sea voyages.
Volunteers visiting docked ships are most often asked for SIM cards to contact families, but they also get far graver requests — from hospital visits for injured seafarers to help with bullying, harassment, lack of shore leave, or even cases where a vessel is abandoned and its crew left without food, pay, or the means to go home, Hill said.
Crews often feel safer speaking confidentially with a chaplain, who then can alert law enforcement and help with legal assistance across different countries.
Just last summer, a chaplain in Houston, Texas, alerted Rodríguez-Martos that a ship “with many problems” was headed to Barcelona. The deacon reported it to port authorities, who boarded the vessel in Spain and required the shipowner to fix the issues, Rodríguez-Martos said.
He also works closely with his counterparts in Marseille, France, which is often the previous port of call along the Mediterranean. Just like Barcelona, which hosted the America’s Cup regattas this fall, Marseille starred this year as the venue for Olympic sailing.
But it’s a very different world on the commercial and cruise ship docks and along the dozens of kilometers (miles) that Stella Maris minivans travel daily to get to ships for visits and to bring seafarers back to their offices.
In both cities, the centers include a “club” with a little bar, some souvenirs for sale, basic entertainment like small basketball courts or tables for pool, foosball, and table tennis. Literature includes religious magazines and maps to the cities’ attractions — especially popular since seafarers “need to see something else” after months at sea, said Gérard Pelen, one of the founders of the ministry in Marseille.
Many ask to be taken to Notre Dame de la Garde, the Catholic basilica whose interior is decorated in maritime-themed votive offerings, said Marc Feuillebois, the director of the welcome center in Marseille’s cruise ship terminal. It hosts about 10,000 seafarers a year.
“It’s the first and the last thing they see,” Feuillebois said of the hilltop church that overlooks the bay of Marseille.
Some observant seafarers also ask to be taken to worship services or to have a faith leader hold one onboard, though interest has declined over the years.
“We only get into the subject if we see they’re interested,” Rodríguez-Martos said. He is planning Christmas Eve Mass even though last year not one seafarer showed up for it in the little Stella Maris chapel, where a figure of Christ is fixed to an old anchor as if it were a cross. On Christmas day, ships are often out at sea instead of at ports, where they would have to pay duties also on non-working days.
But regardless of their own practice, seafarers remain very eager to meet with the volunteers and faith leaders for some much-needed, non-judgmental human contact.
“They know what they say, it won’t be shared. Within five minutes, we’re in confidence, without filters,” said Jean-Philippe Rigaud, a Catholic deacon who leads the ministry in Marseille. Rigaud, who’s retired from a career on container ships and then as port pilot, said seafarers share what’s troubling them, ask for prayers or simply about what’s happening in world news.
His wife of nearly 50 years, Marie-Agnes Rigaud, noted the importance of ministering to the seafarers’ families too. She remembers reaching out to the family of a seafarer from the Philippines for whom she had prayed a rosary at the morgue, and she’s frequently hosted some for Christmas meals in their house in a village outside Marseille.
“They’re people who are for the most part very lonely,” said Bryan Parrish, an American Protestant pastor who plans to volunteer at the Marseille mission after starting a “seaman’s club” in La Rochelle, on France’s Atlantic coast, more than 30 years ago.
Tackling that loneliness is at the heart of the mission to seafarers, even in small gestures. On Christmas Eve, for instance, Stella Maris delivered hand-sized Nativity scenes and nougat candy to seven ships docked in Barcelona.
“It’s a way of saying, ’It’s Christmas, we’re thinking of you,” Rodríguez-Martos said.
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