Celtic, Real Madrid, a north Ayrshire seminary and a bottle of El Dorado

At 15 years of age – and for reasons I’ve never since quite been able to explain - I had the notion of becoming a priest. My old school friend, Michael was studying with an outfit – founded in France – called the Sacred Heart Fathers. 

For other reasons that were never properly explained to me this order of priests and brothers chose Kilwinning in North Ayrshire as their Scottish outpost. And this was where I found myself that spring and wondering how in the name of the Almighty I could find a way of getting to Parkhead for that game. 

The Sacred Heart Fathers had a laissez-faire approach to the formation of boys for the priesthood. It would be unfair to describe them as a Catholic hippie outfit but the two priests in charge of our education and instruction in pastoral care were quite a chilled pair. I decided to trust to their laid-back approach and asked them if it might be possible to have a seminary social outing to Parkhead for the game. 

The priests were keen on ensuring that our formation included a significant slice of culture that extended beyond religion. Trips to the cinema and theatre were not uncommon and we were permitted occasionally to attend local fund-raising dances with very little supervision. 

I argued that a trip to see Celtic play the most famous football club on the planet might pay dividends if our future labours in The Lord’s vineyard were to take us to a Latin-American country or one with a large Hispanic community.  It would surely provide a few handy anecdotes and ice-breakers if we were, say, to find ourselves preaching to the masses in an impoverished South American community. “Everyone knows about Real Madrid,” I told them. 

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And besides, I said to the two fathers, I’m sure Celtic will give us free tickets if I write to Desmond White, the Chairman and Company Secretary. Neither of these two priests were Scottish and so I was able to lay it on a bit thick about Celtic being founded by Catholic priests. And how they always liked to help the poor – especially poor boys from working-class backgrounds who had pledged to give up all earthly and temporal possessions to bring the Lord’s kingdom to far-flung and inhospitable places. 

“If you can get Celtic to provide us with a dozen free tickets,” said Father Grant, “then I’ll drive us all up to Glasgow in the mini-bus.”

This being an Ayrshire seminary accepting boys from all over west central Scotland there was a decent mix of allegiances. A few of them, of course, liked Kilmarnock and there was at least one Morton fan; a couple of St Mirren supporters and one Motherwell supporter. There’s always an awkward character in groups of adolescent boys and so there might even have been one of us who presented as a Rangers supporter for the sheer hell of it. 

Few of them believed that Celtic would simply send 12 tickets for one of the biggest matches ever played at Parkhead to a group of seminarians just because we were playing the poverty-stricken Catholic card. I was curiously confident, though. In my letter to Desmond White I’d said how much we all missed Celtic and how being able to attend this game would make our spiritual burdens just a little easier to bear. And, of course, we would ensure that Holy Mass would be offered in our little chapel for his intentions. 

Less than a week later, a large brown envelope arrived that seemed bulkier than usual. I swear to God that I felt more tension opening it than I ever experienced with my Higher and ‘O’ Grade results. It bore a Glasgow postmark and upon tearing it open a sheet of white notepaper headed by that unmistakable and immortal embossed green crest fell out. “The Celtic Football and Athletic Coy 1888.” Inside were the 12 golden match tickets. God bless Desmond White!

But there was another small scrap of paper, also bearing the Celtic crest. It was a bill of sale amounting to about £30 to cover the cost of the tickets and asking that payment be made by cheque or postal order within seven days. Ah, this I wasn’t expecting. Things, as they stood, might get a little trickier now. 

Our Father Superior, a hard and unsentimental Irish/Australian called Father Walsh affected to be less than impressed. “I thought you said we’d be getting them for free,” he said to me. Every penny possessed by the Sacred Heart Fathers was closely watched, he told me. The Orderdemanded vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. “How am I supposed to justify spending 30 quid on a football match? Later this year, some poor African orphans will have to go without because of this. I hope you know that, McKenna.”

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I mumbled something about Celtic being a charitable organisation that annually gave half of its profits to help starving children all over the world. 

He relented though, for by then he’d also been caught up in the Hoopla surrounding this game. And so we travelled through to watch Celtic take on the mighty Real Madrid. The goals by George McCluskey and Johnny Doyle made it all worthwhile. 

I’d also made a pre-arrangement with a few of my old, less pious school-mates who had –also by prior arrangement – brought a few bottles of El Dorado, the Buckfast of its day. I was later able to explain the alcohol on my breath as being nothing more than the lemonade shandies you could buy then and whose alcohol content wouldn’t have caused a mouse to shimmy.

The following week, Father Walsh called me into his study. A kindly local benefactor, whose son had been on a spiritual retreat with us a few weeks before, had heard about the case of the Real Madrid tickets and had personally covered the cost. 

There were no flies on Father Walsh. And there were no flies either on Desmond White, guardian of the sacred Celtic biscuit-tin.