When I was in my last term at school I was electrified by the arrival of a sensational postulant from America. Here, I thought, was a veritable man. Great heavens, he was six years older than the rest of us. He was clad in white plus-fours and horrifyingly blue stockings which, he said, had been bought on arrival so that he could present himself in sober attire. He had worked his way over, signing on as a deck hand in a ship called the Steel Inventor. Our inspection of the photograph of this glamorous ship did not leave the impression that the voyage had been comfortable.
We loved him in the novitiate. Any dull moment could be enlivened by asking him about his jobs in America since leaving school. I seem to remember that he assured us that he had had sixty three. He was enormous fun; and in those first years he still preserved glorious transatlantic expressions of great vividness.
We soon found that beneath the vaunting toughness a genuine and rather sensitive man, very different to the image he tried to project. His vivid stories delighted but did not illuminate. His narrative style lacked clarity. He had left Ampleforth and his home in Liverpool at the age of fifteen and emigrated to California with his family. But - thank God for his loyal and simple heart - his vocation had persisted. He burst upon us at the age of twenty four.
Our paths divided after ordination. He went on to the Mission and moved, bewilderingly and a bit bewildered, from parish to parish.
[For the record, these parishes were Workington from 1940, Leyland from 1943, Cardiff from 1949, St Alban's Warrington from 1953, St Peter's Liverpool from 1957, Workington again from 1966. He joined the St Louis, Missouri Community in October 1969, where he died after a long illness (the first of that community to die) on 20th June. Ed.]
He always maintained that he was, vocationally, a pioneer. We kept in touch - one always does with a fellow novice; and he was a splendid letter-writer - and his stories of parish life, like the stories of pre-monastic employment, were vivid and various, totally unbelievable and wholly unclear, and enormously warming. And so after twenty five years on the Mission he went to St Louis. I had the joy ot seeing him there last autumn, facing death, half frightened and half serene, and still in a glorious muddle. He had great depth of loyalty and obedience. Though he could never express it, the sheer lovableness of his personality was like a search-light of truth.
Ampleforth
Father Mark joined the Ampleforth community 1 year after me and we got to know each other pretty well - through novitiate, juniorate and up to a year or two after ordination. Memories are clear and vivid. Mark was a colourful man - energetic, athletic, unconventional in many ways, never afraid to express strong or definite opinions but instantly prepared to modify them if they should be declared rash or too trenchant. He left as a young priest for the parishes and I barely saw him during the many years he was working outside the monastery.
Then quite suddenly he was back in my life as a member of the new community in St Louis, where the conditions and opportunities were so different from those in the English scene. He lived eight years - the last two as a dying man. He had experienced a good deal of frustration and was conscious of the same feelings here in St Louis where the opportunities for the sort of pastoral work he felt he could best do are limited but it was for him a happy experience - one of his longest sojourns in any one place since priesthood. He was the same colourful and explosive character as he had been in the 1930's though his bodily energy was now not adequate to match his mental alertness, enquiring mind, freshness of outlook and unpredictableness in expression. In community meetings his contributions showed that he had been giving a lot of thought to the matter in hand and they concentrated on the pastoral slant that should, he felt, always be kept in mind in discussions concerning monastic renewal and presence in our area.
By the parishioners of St Anselm's, the groups of interested enquirers, the geriatric centres and his many other friends, his racy speech, his unconventional way of giving counsel and preaching homilies was much appreciated. People loved him.
His brethren have lost a monk who gave an outstanding example of regular attendance at prayer, ready willingness to take part and contribute to community living and a presence and a spirit which coped with an exhausting and debilitating disease with great courage, Christian faith and a refusal to give in to self-pity. As one of his doctors said,'He's been living on sheer guts for months...'
St Louis Priory, Missouri.
WILFRID MARK HAIDY 20 June 1977
1907 6 Oct Born Waterloo Liverpool
1931 21 Sep Habit Abbot Matthews
1932 22 Sep Simple Vows " "
1935 22 Sep Solemn Vows " "
1936 Apr Tonsure & Minor Orders
19 Jul Subdeacon Bishop Shine
1937 18 Jul Deacon " "
1939 23 Jul Priest " "
1940 Feb Workington
1943 Sep Leyland
1949 Sep Cardiff
1953 Sep St Alban;s Warrington
1957 Oct St Peter's Liverpool
1966 Sep Workington
1969 Oct St Louis Missouri
1977 20 Jun Died in St Louis
Buried at St Louis