16 April 2014, The Tablet

For those in peril

by Philip Crispin

Ministry to mariners

 
His name is Volodymyr, a sailor from Crimea, and he is desperate. At sea for the past month aboard a ship with little more than a small television with a broken aerial, his thoughts were for his family caught up in the upheavals of his homeland.So when Fr Colum Kelly boards the huge vessel carrying Ukrainian coal to fire the power stations of the United Kingdom, the first question put to him by the frantic sailors, to whom as a chaplain for the Apostleship of the Sea (AoS) he is ministering, is: “Internet, please?”Fr Kelly is based at Immingham in north-east Lincolnshire. A vast and dirty industrial complex, on the southern bank of the Humber estuary, it is the largest cargo port in the country and yet, as Fr Kelly puts it, it is “an invisible world”. Here, amid cr
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