The Flying Fathers are a group of Canadian Roman Catholic priests who regularly tour North America as an ice hockey team, playing exhibition games against local teams to raise money for charities. The team had the motto "praying and playing". History The organization was founded in 1963 by Brian McKee and Les Costello, two priests from Northern Ontario. Costello was a former professional hockey player, who played for the Toronto Maple Leafs in the 1940s, last playing 15 games during the 1948–49 season before his ordination as a priest. Costello was in North Bay in 1963 when he heard stories about a boy who had lost use of one eye, with his single mother unable to cover medical costs. He organized some priests to play a charity game against "guys who were in worse shape" to raise funds for the family. From the game's revenues, the team donated about CA$5,000 () to the mother. The original team had no name, with the members eventually choosing between "Flying Fathers" and "Puckster Priests". A 1987 article in the Chicago Tribune described the team as "[trying] to do for hockey what the Harlem Globetrotters did for basketball". By 1987, about 100 priests had played at least one game as a member of the team. In December 2002, Costello fell to the ice during the pre-game warmup of a Flying Fathers game after a puck got caught in his skates. He hit his head on the ice, skipped that night's game and the subsequent game, soon fell into a coma, and died six days later when his family took him off life support at St. Michael's Hospital. The team disbanded in 2009 from a lack of hockey player priests. In the early 2010s, seminarians from St. Augustine's Seminary in Toronto organized an eight-team tournament that was soon referred to as the "Father Costello Classic". The team was reformed in February 2019 for three benefit games in Ontario and Quebec with the hopes of a more long-term revival. It consisted of 12 priests drawn from the dioceses of Hamilton, Kingston, Ottawa, Peterborough, St. Catharines, and Toronto. The re-creation of the team was ascribed to several purposes: the Canadian cultural attachment to the game; evangelizing for the Roman Catholic Church in Canada, and to provide insight into the priesthood. The team is the subject of the book Holy Hockey: The Story of Canada’s Flying Fathers written