Press Room

Below we have links to notable articles written for us in the recent press. Have a read and let us know your comments.

"Nova et Vetera LXXV: The Apostleship of the Sea"

Published in The Catholic Times 

Fr Nicholas Schofield

Holiday highlights are often found in the unexpected. Last year, I visited the Breton town of Vannes, mainly to see the shrine of St Vincent Ferrer, a fiery Dominican preacher

who was descended from the English Ferrers and the Scottish Stewarts. As Solemn Mass was concluding at the fine Cathedral, roads started being cleared and crowds began to gather. A local told us that the annual ceremony of the blessing of the sea was about to take place. And, sure enough, a small procession soon emerged from the church, comprising of a statue of Our Lady, clergy, the mayor and some women dressed in local costume. They made their way through the town gate to the little harbour, where prayers were said, a floral bouquet was energetically thrown into the sea by the mayor and a charming hymn was sung. Then, like most of the crowd, we retired to a brasserie for moules frittes, washed down with Breton cider......

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“This is no life.” The hard, cold reality of modern seafaring.

©  2011  Rose George

It was only late afternoon, but already dark and stormy, on the Thursday of the week before Christmas 2009, when the cargo freighter Danny FII approached the Lebanese port of Tripoli en route from Uruguay to Syria. She carried 18,000 cattle, 10,000 sheep and 83 humans, including four passengers, and had been converted from a car carrier into a modern-day Noah’s Ark. Danny FII was not a new ship, but she was modern, because her crew was multi-global: a British captain and chief engineer, 59 Pakistanis, some Filipinos, a Lebanese and a Syrian. She was high-sided as car-carriers are, with some rust. Though she was Uruguayan, she flew another country’s flag. In all respects, she was an average member of the 90,000-strong fleet of freighters that sail the seas, bringing us 95 per cent of everything that we consume, from the computer that I write this on, to the ink on this page, and the coffee that you drink while you read this.......

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Hats on for seafarers: A Guardian comment piece on Woolly Hat Week

Posted on 4th February 2011

©  2011  Rose George

I don’t knit. But I may learn by Monday, because next week is Woolly Hat Week, when the kind-hearted of Britain are asked to wear a woolly hat to work, in honour of the world’s seafarers. They would also like donations, of course, or even a hat. They distribute 20,000 a year, all knitted by volunteers such as Jean Best of Merseyside, who was in the middle of a maroon bonnet when I phoned her last year to ask why she was putting her time and wool to seafarers she will never meet, who sail on ships she doesn’t see, over seas that she will probably only ever fly over.......

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