Chaplains minister to ship workers far from home

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NEW ORLEANS -- Deacon Pat Dempsey, a port chaplain, remembers the day he rode a launch out into the Mississippi River to visit a crew aboard an anchored vessel. In a backpack he carried his book of the Gospels, the music and the sacred vessels he would need to conduct a shipboard prayer service.

In another pack pressed against his chest he carried the goods the homeward-bound mariners had asked him to deliver: more than $300 in lingerie from Victoria’s Secret.

So goes the life of a port chaplain, said Dempsey and co-chaplain Reggie Seymour, both Catholic deacons: It’s generally a mix, they said, of doing simple favors and providing simple comforts to low-wage laborers who find themselves far from home for months on end.

Various faith communities operate port chaplaincies for visiting crews along the Mississippi River.

The New Orleans archdiocese recently opened a new home for its Stella Maris port ministry, not far from the Global Maritime Ministries office that’s run by Southern Baptists and other evangelicals.

Refitted with a grant from the International Transport Workers Federation, a global federation of transportation unions, the Stella Maris headquarters is designed to provide a nonindustrial respite for mariners confined for weeks to bare steel sleeping compartments and the working-factory decor of tankers, freighters and other vessels.

The house is outfitted with a simple chapel, a comfortable game room with television, a kitchen where mariners may attempt some home cooking, a pool table, a bank of computers for sending e-mail home and a backyard with a basketball hoop.

Racks of toiletries, underwear, gloves and work gear are available, free for the taking.

Dempsey, a former Defense Department investigator, and Seymour, a former Customs official, are now both unpaid deacons and usually staff the new center in the evenings, when foreign mariners with visas are most able to get off the ship.

Crews overwhelmingly are Filipino, with some Indians, Pakistanis and Eastern Europeans, they said.

After weeks shipboard they crave a break, Dempsey said. Chaplains can provide phone cards to help them reach home and occasionally will drive them to do some shopping.

Dempsey said he has found the crews overwhelmingly grateful for their service.

National Catholic Reporter May 2, 2008