Not for fair weather fans

The North Sea gate crashes just across the railway track, wind and rain hurrying uninvited ashore and with little to impede their perishing progress.

There've been warmer days in mid-November, mind, than the July Sunday afternoon on which the town's seven Roman Catholic parishes celebrated a Millennium Jubilee Mass - Mass of the Day, as someone neatly sub-titled it - as culmination of a weekend of events.

The club so often on its knees - more re-election applications than any in Football League history - was host to 1,000 Catholics no less accustomed to the supplicant position.

"If wet in St Joseph's," the programme had pragmatically announced. It rained and they stayed at Victoria Park, perhaps recalling Mr Kenneth Grahame in the Wind in the Willows who wondered what was a little wet to a water rat.

Or perhaps Hartlepool is just waterproof.

In November 1916 two enemy bombs had fallen on the old wooden stand, the club somewhat optimistically spending several years seeking compensation from the German government whilst enduring until the mid-1980s the joke that it was impossible to tell the difference. Now the Vic (as the faithful know it) is handsome in a Third Division sort of a way, the Cyril Knowles stand almost full for the celebration, a small overflow into the seats behind the top goal.

The mayor was there, too, but not the familiar local MP, a couple of VIP bearing black limousines tucked up behind the executive boxes.

"They're from Mason's the undertakers," someone confided.

Hartlepool has long been strongly Catholic, its early influences Irish, the most pressing need for schools rather than for churches. St Mary's, on the Headland, was first to open in 1851; St Patrick's and St John Vianney's - the two most recent - opened within weeks of one another in 1961.

Most have seen bigger congregations, of course; even the church hall bingo is said to be declining now.

Ambrose Griffiths, Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle, led the mass from beneath a canopy in midfield. Bob Spence - long at St Augustine's in Darlington and now one of four diocesan Vicars General - delivered the homily, reminding us all that he is a Newcastle United season ticket holder and that this was his Victoria Park debut.

Though the Roman Catholic Bishop of Middlesbrough is an Arsenal fan - like the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chief Rabbi and one or two others of note - the Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle keeps his allegiance to himself. Probably he supports Sunderland.

A dozen or so priests concelebrated, Fr Eamonn Croghan excused boots (as they used long ago to say of Alfie Bass) because he is the assiduous official photographer on such occasions.

The splendid programme depicted Fr Stephen Johnson, the Area Dean, on the ground in the arms akimbo position of a million pound signing. Or a man praying for some sunshine.

The congregation, invited to bring a picnic, had used their experience to have their Yorkshire puddings at home; the luminously jacketed stewards carried umbrellas in Hartlepool blue and white.

"A forum where hope and joy are expressed in emphatic terms, in considerable volume and with great gusto," Bishop Ambrose had written in the programme and so, elements notwithstanding, it was to prove.

For the first ten minutes, however, things seemed rather half hearted, as if they were 5-0 down at home to Darlington and the referee was wetting his final whistle.

A hand clapping Gloria warmed them, as well it might.

Canon Spence revealed that as a youngster the only two things he wanted to be were a footballer and a priest, told them that they were Hartlepool's Jesus Team and that they had a brilliant manager, maintained the theme with the suggestion that the slick, the smug, the fat cats and "especially religious people who know it all" were in God's third division. The unemployed, the sick and the old were in the Premiership.

We heard the Gospel about a prophet not being without honour except among his own, sang good Catholic hymns like Soul Of My Saviour and In Bread We Bring You, watched as priests made tracks across the sodden turf to their communion stations by the touchline fence, each diligently pursued by an umbrella wielding steward.

The only slightly curious thing about that little exercise was that it had stopped raining.

The service finished with Shine Jesus Shine, though not in a meteorological sense, the column adjourning with some of the worthies for a cup of something resuscitating in an executive box. The pies were simply terrific.

JUST a week after enthronement into his new diocese, the Rt Rev John Packer - Bishop of Ripon and Leeds - duly visited Kirklington, near Bedale (AYS, July 22) for Evensong last Sunday.

His wife Barbara came, too, climbed the tower and helped them ring the bells. Clive Mansell, Kirklington's rector, is duly impressed - "a lovely couple, and you won't get many bishops' wives doing that.