I am very grateful for the presence of all of you gathered here to pray for the repose of the soul of Fr Michael Sandeman. I am especially grateful to the Bishop of the diocese and Bishop Pearson who have come to join us. To my way of thinking it would be more fitting that the Bishop of the diocese should be presiding as principal celebrant of this Mass. It is kind of him to allow the monastic Superior of Fr Michael to take his place. It is good to see many of you from Workington itself because in the past Fr Michael served you on two occasions - in 1943 for three years and again in 1962 for four. And, as you know, the latter part of his priestly life has been spent in this diocese at Warwick Bridge. To complete this part of the record we recall too that for nine years he was parish priest at St Mary's in Warrington.
Fr Michael started out in life, after school at Stonyhurst and Ampleforth, as a member of the Forces. He was at Cranwell in 1926 and served in the Royal Air Force for eight years (in Quetta and Ambala), so he was already a mature man of thirty when he first became a monk, and that experience in the Royal Air Force was inevitably an important influence in his life. He was a disciplined man and a very loyal one; he had a clear head and a mind that thought very logically, but he was no academic. He was commanding in presence and in manner. A certain gruffness could be misunderstood, but there was none who could equal him in obedience. He owed much to the Air Force and, had he remained in it, I suspect that instead of priests assembled at this altar in albs, there would have been high-ranking Air Force officers honouring one superior in rank.
But he chose to follow Christ in the monastic way; its disciplines and its routines he could understand. His training and his temperament fitted him admirably for that kind of life. And he would serve the Church - that too was clear, clear in its teaching and certain in the disciplines that it imposed. Not that it was the externals that were important to him, as they should not be to us. Deep down there was a dedication to the things of God.
But the world of the 'thirties and 'forties, in which he was brought up in young manhood, passed; the world changed and so did the Church, and the Second Vatican Council was both its symbol and its instrument, bringing new ideas and new ways of thinking and acting. Some of our best priests suffered most from this; the most dedicated, the most loyal, the most hard-working suffered silently and loyally. Fr Michael was one of these. The Church was not the Church that he knew as a young man and the monastic life was not the monastic life that he had joined. You stuck to your past, you stuck to your post with that discipline and loyalty which characterizes those that we know in the Forces and should be the characteristic of every Christian.
Dedication to Christ means that sometime or other there will be a heavy cross to carry and new disciplines to learn. At times the pain can be very deep, so hurtful that a man can be overcome by a kind of paralysis in certain situations, a paralysis not sought or desired but one which compounds the pain. That is a spiritual experience which not everybody knows and is, I suspect, allowed to the chosen ones. It can be said that Fr Michael knew that experience, which of course is to share in the very experience of Christ our Lord Himself. But just as the wounds of Christ gave life, so indeed do ours, and a priest who knows the kind of experience I have described has something to give to the weak, to the sick, to the old. There were few more dedicated to these than Fr Michael.
There will be brother officers, many of them killed in the war, ready to welcome a man who must have been among the outstanding ones of their number. But there will he another guard of honour to welcome him. And it will be composed of old people, of sick people, the little ones beloved of God. They will be there to salute him, a faithful, dedicated, loyal man who learned from the sufferings of Christ that there was something which he could give and which he gave with all his heart, because through that suffering, he discovered the heart of others and could get through to them. May he rest in peace.
AUSTIN MICHAEL SANDEMAN 30 June 1975
1905 17 Nov Born at Colinton Edinburgh
1916-19 Educ Hodder & Stonyhurst
1919-23 Educ Ampleforth
1925-27 RAF College Cranwell
1927-35 RAF
1935 22 Sep Habit at Ampleforth Abbot Matthews
1936 23 Sep Simple Vows " "
1939 23 Sep Solemn Vows Abbot Byrne
1940 9 Jan Subdeacon Bishop Shine
21 Jul Deacon " "
1941 20 Jul Priest " "
1943 13 Sep Assistant at Workington
1946 Jan Assistant at St Anne's Liverpool
1947 Assistant at St Benedict's Warrington
1953 23 Sep Parish Priest at St Mary's Warrington
1962 20 Sep Assistant at Workington
1966 Sep Assistant at Warwick Bridge
1975 30 Jun Died at N Lonsdale Hospital Barrow-in-Furness
6 Jul Buried at Warwick Bridge