"I just wanted to be a holy priest."
One never knows when God may interfere with retirement plans. After 25 years as a priest, attending Mount St Mary’s Seminary in Maryland in the United States and then serving in the Diocese of St Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, 55-year-old Fr Neil Scantlebury – a native of Barbados – had begun to think of the twilight chapter of his distinguished clerical career: his dream of being a cruise ship chaplain. Growing up in Barbados in the 1970s, he loved crick- et (heroes included Sir Garfield Sobers) and movies (he confesses to now enjoying Netflix, especially action films). “A friend was a cruise chaplain and he also enjoyed seeing the world,” Bishop Scantlebury recalled over lunch in a hotel a short walk from the house in Speightstown where he was brought up. “So I had begun to make enquiries…”
