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Death of Fr Martin Haigh, monk of Ampleforth


Fr Martin Haigh OSB, Benedictine monk of Ampleforth Abbey, died peacefully in the monastery infirmary at Ampleforth Abbey on 31 January 2015, just over two weeks after his 93rd birthday.

He will be forever associated with two special events in 1953: he sent to Sir John Hunt, leader of the Everest Expedition, a small crucifix blessed by Pope Pius XII, asking that it be placed on the summit of Mount Everest; and he started the annual Ampleforth Lourdes Pilgrimage with the then Fr Basil Hume, a pilgrimage of which he was Director until 1987.

Sixty years later and into his nineties, Fr Martin was still giving presentations to College students about the Everest crucifix placed on the summit by Edmund Hilary. “When [the real] history of the world comes to be read”, Fr Martin had written to Sir John Hunt, “the day when men climbed to the very summit of the earth and left there the sign and symbol of our faith will rank as one of the very great days in the history of the world”.

For more than fifty years Fr Martin also gave lectures on the Shroud of Turin, culminating in the 2004 release of a DVD and video, ‘The Wonder of the Shroud’, leading one reviewer to state: “Roll over Sister Wendy Becket and her Old Masters. For a similarly appealing, compulsively viewable, ‘natural’ TV presenter, the Shroud has found its Sister Wendy in Fr Martin Haigh, OSB, a quiet-spoken, youthfully octogenarian Benedictine monk based at Ampleforth Abbey”.

Fr Martin Haigh was born in London in 1922 and educated at Ampleforth College. He joined the monastic community in September 1940 and was ordained priest on 17 July 1949.

For more than thirty years Fr Martin had a wide-ranging variety of roles in Ampleforth College: he taught Art and French from 1947-1981; he was a Games Master from 1948-1963; and Housemaster of St Bede’s House from 1963-1977.

At the end of his time in the school, Fr Martin served in the parishes, in Gilling East, Grassendale, Liverpool (1981-1997), Ampleforth village, and Leyland (2001-2006). Fr Martin was an accomplished artist and in 1993 and 1998 had an exhibition of oil pastels in Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral. Today, the walls of the Ampleforth Abbey Tea Shop boast many of his paintings.

At the age of 92, in early 2014, Fr Martin was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukaemia and expressed a desire not to have any treatment, but to let the disease take its course. He died peacefully on 31 January 2015.

Fr Martin’s body will be received into the Abbey Church at Ampleforth at 6pm on Monday 9 February 2015. His funeral Mass will be celebrated at 11.30am in the Abbey Church on Tuesday 10 February, followed by burial in the Monks’ Wood.

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