The next few months saw Mig’s infant sense of vocation tested to the full.

His father’s motives for opposition were practical and genealogical. Mig had shown a peculiar aptitude for all aspects of the family business, commercial and vinicultural. His flirtation with football apart, he had never seemed likely to divert from his preordained role as head of the firm, the sixteenth Miguel in an unbroken line since the fifteenth century. Sherry is a sensitive creature. It likes calm and continuity. Miguel Senior was so upset that he hardly dared go into the bodega during this period.

His mother’s objections were English and social. Behind every great man there is a great woman, telling him he’s driving too fast. This was Cristina Madero’s role in the family, and she found it hard to accept that her control of her husband did not extend to her son. She also felt things would have been managed better back home. The rich Catholic families of Hampshire provided the Church with money, congregation, and voluntary workers, but saw no reason to provide priests, not when the poor Catholic families of Ireland needed the work.

Only Mig’s young brother, Cristo, inspired by a vision of his future which did not involve being perpetually second-in-command, encouraged him.

Father Adolfo was the one who most vigorously questioned his vocation. “It means a calling,” he mocked. “Are you sure it’s not just an echo of your own vanity?”

Often Mig was tempted to silence him with the revelation of his experience of the stigmata, but a natural reluctance to make such an enormous claim kept him quiet.

But one day when Father Adolfo sneered that he had so far seen precious little evidence of that special spirituality he looked for in a postulant, Mig could not resist the temptation to put him in his place by revealing his other special gift.

Far from being impressed, the priest reacted as if he’d confessed a mortal sin.

“You foolish child!” he cried. “Such trafficking with the alleged spirits of the departed is a common trick of the devil to seduce susceptible minds. Remember Faustus. The Helen he saw was no more than a succuba, a demon that comes in the guise of a naked woman and steals men’s seed. Be not deceived, my child. These fancies of yours are the first steps toward the mouth of hell which gapes wide to receive errant souls.”