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Madeleine Beard

The Legacy of Monsignor Alfred Gilbey, 1901-1998

(published by The Latin Mass, Winter 2000)

"He never omitted so much as one collect of his daily service, and that he used to say commonly to himself alone, without the help of any chaplain, not in such speed or hasty manner to be at an end, as many will do, but in a most reverent and devout manner, so distinctly and treatably pronouncing every word that he seemed a very devourer of heavenly food, never satiate or filled therewith. Insomuch as, talking on a time with a Carthusian monk, who much commended his zeal and diligent pains in compiling his book against Luther, he answered again, saying that he wished that time of writing had been spent in prayer, thinking that prayer would have done more good and was of more merit."

Cardinal Pole was recalling St. John Fisher, in a passage quoted in Michael Davies's biography of the martyr Saint John Fisher, published by The Neumann Press, 1999. Soon after reading this passage on a farm in Sussex where I live fifty miles south of London, I received a facsimile from The Latin Mass Magazine in Connecticut, suggesting I write about the influence of Monsignor Gilbey, Chaplain of Fisher House, from 1932 to 1965. This is the University Catholic Chaplaincy in Cambridge where St. John Fisher had for so many years been Chancellor of the University. Fisher had arrived in Cambridge in 1483, received his BA in 1487, became a master of Arts in 1491 and was ordained to the priesthood that same year. Five hundred years later, as a Graduate student in Cambridge I witnessed a revival of Cambridge Catholicism within Fisher House, a revival which was thanks primarily to the continuing influence of Monsignor Gilbey who had been Chaplain when Fisher was canonised in 1935. He left Cambridge in 1965, the year in which the Second Vatican Council was concluded. He left because he did not want to admit women undergraduates to Fisher House, who had a separate Chaplaincy of their own. He was anxious to retain the quasi-monastic atmosphere of the Chaplaincy.

Gilbey's successor as Chaplain was Father Incledon, whose portrait can be seen in the Chaplain's dining room, a portrait that literally personifies the revolution that occurred throughout the Western world and the Roman Catholic Church during the late 1960s, after all the progress that had been made. Without a hint of clerical black, Father Incledon wears a pale jacket with wide lapels, an open shirt and a large cravat, his spaniel (which used to follow him into Mass) on his knee, the Chaplain's flowing hair touching his shirt collar. He remained at Fisher House until 1977. His successor was the Reverend Maurice Couve de Murville, a languid and approachable Cambridge man whose via media at Fisher House before his appointment as Archbishop of Birmingham lasted until 1982. Some five hundred years after the martyr Chancellor of Cambridge had arrived in Cambridge, the new Chaplain, a Benedictine from Belmont Abbey in Herefordshire, came back to Cambridge and set about restoring the lost Tradition of robust Catholicism. He was disliked by the Protestant clergy in Cambridge. That was good news. He was disliked by the liberal Catholic Fellows of the University who plagued his time there as only academics can. Unusually, the choice of University Chaplain at Oxford and Cambridge is influenced by the laity. A Board of Catholic Fellows have their say. So eventually after six years the Fellows were glad of his departure. He was too successful; he brought back the tradition of the Faith in its liturgy and doctrine to hundreds of undergraduates who were educated at Catholic schools and had received not one shred of Catholic teaching.

Dom Christopher Jenkins OSB was succeeded by Father John Osman, also a convert and Chaplain from 1988 to 1994. He continued the tradition of success. Daily Exposition nurtured an impressive number of vocations. But they were the wrong sort of vocations, according to his superiors. Too Conservative. So Father Osman, having built on the nurturing of the Faith and developed Fisher House into a safe and crowded haven for University Catholics who cared about their Faith, moved on too. And throughout these blossoming years in Catholic Cambridge there remained the influence and intermittent priestly presence of Monsignor Gilbey, who started to return the relics which he had wisely taken with him, who came back to say the Immemorial Mass as he always had, and whose final resting place was in the tiny courtyard close to the chapel and the rooms where, as Chaplain from 1932 until 1965, he had re-established the One True Faith, in cold Protestant Cambridge.

I had started going to daily Mass as an undergraduate at the University of London in 1977. Some Protestant evangelicals had approached me in a cafeteria, had wanted me to meet them again to discuss The Bible (of which I had no intention) and had told me that Heaven was the natural destiny of everyone. I had told them that there is such a thing as Purgatory. I went to Mass, at the church of St Charles Borromeo in Ogle Street, north of Oxford Street then with its rather odd plastic altar, the nearest Catholic church to where I lived. Thereafter my closest parish church was St James's Spanish Place, where on Sundays the wealthy congregation from North London came to the Sung Latin Mass. Once the chapel of the Spanish Embassy, it is a large central London church yet not on everyone's Catholic map. Thanks to John Paul Getty (whom the Parish Priest, Monsignor Miles, encountered recuperating in one of the private clinics which exist within the parish near Harley Street) the interior of the church has now been richly restored. A transformation from the rather drab and dark church which I remember in 1977, and indeed the same church which my mother remembers visiting with my father in 1948 in order for her to have an idea of what a Roman Catholic wedding was like. The bride was a contemporary of my mother's at school, the Hon. Jacquetta Digby (younger sister of the late Pamela Harriman) whose father, Lord Digby, could not contain his disgust at giving away his daughter in a Catholic church and where few relatives were present. If you visit the church today, the sun shines through the stained glass windows and lights up the Sanctuary's gold, as pale and gleaming as Spanish sherry. Indeed, Monsignor Gilbey's Spanish mother, Maria Victorina de Ysasi, was from the Gonzalez-Byass family, "who make the sherry which you so kindly offer me" he once commented to a priest. His mother had sent her son Alfred to the Jesuit Beaumont College, near Windsor, which fulfilled the function of what Eton had done long ago, as a school for Catholic gentlemen. After Beaumont he went to Trinity College Cambridge in 1920, studied for the priesthood at the Beda College in Rome and in 1929 was ordained in the Gilbey family home of Mark Hall in Essex. He was ordained "in his own patrimony", that is, he retained responsibility for his own maintenance, instead of being sponsored by a bishop and incardinated into a diocese. For three years after his ordination he served as the Bishop of Brentwood's Private Secretary, before becoming Chaplain at Cambridge. His inspiration as a priest were the writings of Monsignor R.H. Benson, who had been a priest in Cambridge, where he had started what he called a Motor Mission around East Anglia. Monsignor Gilbey was also perpetrating the work of his predecessor as Chaplain, Dr. Lopes.

In the Autumn of 1980 I found myself as a Graduate student at Jesus College Cambridge. Founded in 1496, the college had originally been a Benedictine convent. Although my college was not quite in the centre of the city, the Chaplaincy certainly was, being hidden away behind the central market square which was directly opposite the University Church of Great St Mary's on King's Parade. The site was thanks to an undergraduate who, in 1923, was having a drink in "The Black Swan" public house and was told by the landlord that the seventeenth-century building was being sold. He told the Chaplain, Dr. Lopes, who realised its potential immediately and purchased the property as premises for the Chaplaincy. Later, in 1964, the neighbouring medieval street called Petty Cury was demolished and replaced by a concrete shopping mall. Monsignor Gilbey once told me the happiest day of his life was looking at the plans and seeing that Fisher House was to be spared. This escape from modern destruction was profoundly symbolic. The public house's panelled room with its large fireplace became the dining room and was deliberately reminiscent of High Table in the colleges. Monsignor Gilbey was aware that the Cambridge dining tradition was central to attracting converts, to introduce the Faith as being socially and intellectually central to the life of the University, as it had been in Fisher's time. On his return visits to Cambridge, Monsignor Gilbey stayed at Trinity. Hearing that I was writing a book on the history of the landed aristocracy in the twentieth century (the computer output of some of the earlier chapters he put in his suitcase), on one occasion Monsignor Gilbey insisted on showing me and a companion the rooms in the college where he stayed. These rooms once belonged to Sir William Harcourt, a fellow of Trinity who later as Chancellor of the Exchequer had first introduced the taxation known as death duties, which gradually crippled so many landowning families. On the ceiling of Harcourt's dining room was the Harcourt coat of arms. "Do you know much about heraldry?" Monsignor Gilbey asked me, in his distinctive but not always distinct voice. I confessed that I did not. "What joys await you," he replied.

The chaplaincy's coat of arms at Fisher House is clearly visible at the entrance on Guildhall Street, where a narrow passage leads into the courtyard where Monsignor Gilbey is buried. Overlooking the tiny courtyard with its Della Robbia is the Great Chamber with its paintings and books. Next to it is the Library, which in Monsignor Gilbey's time was the chapel and which leads on to a walled garden. Mass on Sundays is celebrated in Fisher Hall, a modern building added on in the early 1970s and always unsatisfactory as a place of worship. What was unforgettable was the annual Mass on St John Fisher's Feast Day celebrated in St Michael's Church. It was originally the chapel of Michael House, the College where Fisher was Fellow. To sit in the same choir stalls where once a congregation had heard Mass said by John Fisher was central to Catholic Cambridge life. Here the Gregorian choir's voices resonated properly. The priests in their vestments looked so absolutely right when they sat in the stone niches where priests had sat five hundred years before. It was a lengthy logistical operation for the Servers to move everything from the other side of the Market Square and then back again for this one Mass. But just for one Mass, once every year, Cambridge Catholics were where they ought to be.

Five hundred years after Fisher's time in Cambridge I went to daily Mass in the early 1980s in the small chapel underneath the library along with five or six other daily Mass-goers. Its modern open-plan seating had no proper focus and was more like a seminar room than a chapel. Dom Christopher Jenkins OSB arrived, settling in as Assistant Chaplain before he formally took over as Chaplain. At every Mass, he preached. Not sitting down with the huge missal on his lap, he preached standing, teaching with authority. His preaching was so direct, so clear, so absolutely concerned with using a small amount of time to convey the Truth. His preaching was uncompromising, specific, exact. "They cooked grilled fish on the beach. He showed them that He was truly alive by making sure they could see Him eat the grilled fish. We believe in the resurrection of the body. We are surrounded by mystery."

The chapel was re-ordered. All the "theatre-in-the-round" seats now faced the altar, which was moved to the end of the chapel. A tabernacle was built into the wall, with a solid brass door, a solid Confessional was built. On Fridays there was Benediction in Latin with a Gregorian choir. I had never been to Latin Benediction before. A swinging thurible soon filled the small chapel with incense. The cope and the humeral veil were both in need of repair, a task which I was given the honour of carrying out. Not many people came, but weekly Benediction was always there. And this priest who had been an undergraduate at Peterhouse in the 1950s, from a Welsh non-Conformist background, who on reading Chesterton's Orthodoxy on library duty at school had found himself drawn to the Faith, had later summoned up the courage to see Father Gilbey and tell him that he wished to be received and had been turned away by him and told to come back after he had read John, Chapters 13 to 17; this same priest was now restoring the Faith in Cambridge University in its teaching and its liturgy. Because now Monsignor Gilbey, reviled as out-dated for so long since his departure in 1965, came back to Cambridge fifteen years later. And he started to say in the modern but re-ordered chapel, the Old Rite of Mass.

One or two stalwarts returned. One or two who remembered what they had assumed was a bygone era and who lamented the changes, came back to his Mass again. One was the widow Dr Elisabeth Stopp, a Modern Linguist and Fellow of Girton, translator of St Francis de Sales and biographer of St Jane Frances de Chantal, whose husband Frederick Stopp had been the first Catholic Senior Tutor at Gonville and Caius College. She remembered Evelyn Waugh on his visits to Cambridge and also remembered Penrose Fry, husband of the novelist Sheila Kaye-Smith, who after his wife's death had moved to Cambridge and became Monsignor Gilbey's Administrative Assistant. The Frys had lived in a house in Kent with a small chapel. In this chapel my father served Mass as boy in the 1930s. Formerly an Anglican clergyman, Penrose Fry was rather impressed by my father's Latin, learnt from the Italian Salesian priests who ran the school in Burwash, not far from Kipling's home.

At the gatherings which followed Monsignor Gilbey's Masses there was an air of resignation, that his years as Chaplain, when literally thousands had been converted (some on the train journey between London and Cambridge), when Fisher House was like a club, with its library, upstairs chapel and dining room with its crystal and silver, a hub of Instruction and conversation and devotion, a sense that these years were consigned to the past. But Monsignor Gilbey's sartorial elegance bore witness to a past which was still alive, with his frock coat, old broadbrimmed hat, or cassock trimmed with the purple of a Domestic Prelate to the Pope, which he became in 1950. And few would remember that on the day of the dogmatic definition of the Assumption in November 1950, Monsignor Gilbey had placed a lighted candle in each window of Fisher House and had unfurled a papal flag. Only a few contemporaries in Cambridge who remembered those years welcomed him back. There was a subversive feel to his visits. There was a secretiveness, with whispered invitations to those of us who came to his Masses where the Chaplain was the Server, to come afterwards to Breakfast in the famous dining room. For I had hardly ever been to an Old Mass before.

I followed the others in sitting and kneeling. I was struck by the business-like manner of saying Mass. As Evelyn Waugh once observed, the priest is a craftsman, with a particular task to perform. Something other-worldly was happening and only the priest was responsible. He knew exactly what he was doing, he was in his own world and gave one absolute confidence that this was how it should be done and you didn't actually have to do anything as such. Just be there and be a mysterious part of it. It was because of the Mass that he celebrated that we held Monsignor Gilbey in such respect. Here was a priest who had the quiet yet absolute confidence to continue on and hope for better days. Here was a priest whom I never heard dwell on liturgical horrors, or ever complain. His manner was not like that. It was one of kindness, with a Continental courtly demeanour. Above all, this aged priest exuded a sense of hope.

In 1983, on the suggestion of those who had benefited from Instruction during his three decades as Chaplain, tape recordings were made of the Talks he used to give as Chaplain to potential converts and were published in book form as "We Believe". At last, something tangible. So dense, so wise, so brilliant, the book can be read beneficially just one sentence at a time. He was following in the tradition of the Talks given as public "Conferences" by Monsignor Ronald Knox when Chaplain at Oxford. And upstairs in Fisher House Library Father Christopher Jenkins, in his inimitable style, gave such Instruction talks on Mondays at lunchtime. In 1980 there had been five or six of us at daily Mass at 5 p.m. Changing the Mass time to one o'clock followed by lunch upstairs attracted many more. When Exposition was introduced for an hour before Mass, so many came to Mass one Lent that a notice was put in the newsletter of the city's parish church - a large Victorian church with the tallest spire in Cambridge dedicated to Our Lady and the English Martyrs - urging parishioners (who found it convenient to go to Mass in the more centrally located Chaplaincy) not to attend the weekday Masses in Fisher House as there simply was not the room. Visiting the English College in Rome some years later I recognised half a dozen seminarians from Fisher House. One of them necessarily kept his love of the Old Mass absolutely secret.

Another frequenter of Fisher House, Father Michael Cullinan, who says the Old Mass having attended the Westminster Diocesan seminary, is now the Assistant Parish Priest at St James's Spanish Place, where the Old Rite is celebrated every Sunday morning at 9.30. I was present at Father Cullinan's ordination to the priesthood in Westminster Cathedral in February 1995. An invitation had been sent to Monsignor Gilbey, no reply heard, but unexpectedly there he was, shuffling along in biretta, cassock and deep pink and black splendour, the congregation deeply appreciative of his presence. Monsignor Gilbey had come to the ordination of a traditional priest, sixty-six years after his own ordination. And Father Cullinan's aged and ailing father, whom we had all seen make the presentation of the dalmatic tunic at his son's ordination to the diaconate, when he had been too weak to ascend the steps and the Cardinal had walked down the Cathedral steps to take the tunic from him, on the occasion of this ordination to the priesthood we now saw Father Cullinan's father receive Communion from his only son. Mr Cullinan's health that evening faltered and the next day he received the Last Rites from his newly-ordained son.

Father Michael Cullinan once asked: "How did we get here? How did we go in thirty-odd years from a Church where crowds of Catholics happily worshipped every week in a language they could not understand, to a Church where only a quarter of the people worship at all, and in a liturgy looking and sounding utterly and completely different from that of their grandparents?" Monsignor Gilbey, with a dispensation from Cardinal Heenan to say the Old Mass anywhere, never embraced those changes. Monsignor Gilbey kept steadily on, saying the Immemorial Mass in tiny chapels; in his private Oratory high up a precarious staircase hidden away in the Travellers' Club in London, in the chapel at the top of several flights of stone stairs at the Jesuit church at Farm Street in London, where since his departure from Cambridge he celebrated a First Friday Mass for his Cambridge men and Old Beaumont boys. He said Mass in the chapels of friends in the country and once a month at his cousin's house, Rosehill near Henley-on-Thames, where the altar had come from Mark Hall. In London he said Mass behind the green velvet curtain of St Wilfrid's Chapel to the right of the High Altar in the Oratory Church in London. Built by the church's founder, Father Frederick Faber, the church was dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Here at this altar on the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary 1996, the former Provost of the Oratory and a convert of Monsignor Gilbey's while at Cambridge, Father Michael Napier, started to say Mass. He collapsed, two Priests were summoned, he was taken to hospital in his Mass vestments and a few hours later he died. And there was Monsignor Gilbey again, at the funeral of a priest who had maintained the splendour of the liturgy meticulously celebrated in Latin in beautiful vestments to the accompaniment of organ and a professional choir, in a central London church attracting thousands every Sunday and where the large sanctuary was never re-ordered. During all those years Father Michael Napier, the son of a general, had steered a tactical and diplomatic course. The Old Rite was and still is celebrated not in the main church itself but in what is known as the Little Oratory on the other side of the courtyard. I used to make my way the sixty miles from Cambridge to London for the 10 a.m. Mass held in the Little Oratory every Sunday. (One morning, arriving at the station to discover the trains from Cambridge were not running, I met up with another of Monsignor Gilbey's converts and his family and together we made the journey by bus, taxi, train and subway, still managing to get to the Mass by ten o'clock.)

On the morning of 26th March 1998 Monsignor rose at 6 a.m. to prepare for his early morning Mass in St Wilfrid's Chapel in the Oratory, as he had done for five days a week for more than thirty years. He died later that morning. The last Mass he ever celebrated had been the day before, the Feast of the Annunciation. Thousands thronged the Oratory for his funeral in the Old Rite on 6th April, only the second occasion when the Old Rite had been celebrated in the main Oratory church for more than thirty years (the first being another funeral earlier in the year). Every member of the congregation had some memory of him. As the congregation surged out afterwards you could hear the mournful tolling of the bell. I thought back to the empty modern chapel in Fisher House and the occasion one June when I had arranged to meet some fellow pilgrims before setting off for the spot in Cambridge where traditionally Our Lady of Mount Carmel had presented the Scapular to St Simon Stock. We were to meet to say a prayer in the chapel at 9 o'clock. On arrival I saw the Altar cards set up, six candlesticks on the altar. To my astonishment at that moment Monsignor Gilbey entered the chapel and started to say Mass. Afterwards I told him that we were going on a pilgrimage. He had given us a pilgrim's blessing. He was then ninety. On his eighty-fifth birthday, falling on 13th July, avoiding the Battle of Boyne and Bastille Day, he had been invited back to Fisher House by Father Christopher Jenkins. This is what he preached.

"I feel rather like a character in a medieval legend - that of the priest who has led an indifferent life and is called back from the grave to preach one sermon on which his fate for eternity depends. If there were such a medieval legend I am sure that Our Blessed Lady would have come to the poor priest's aid and produced a beautiful sermon after which he would have been carried up to heaven holding on to the hem of her mantle. Having myself been called back from the dead to talk to you I have no such aid, not even from your Chaplain. When I enquired of him what I should talk about he replied: "Oh, anything you like." In my day at the Chaplaincy, I used to try and keep the Preacher on the straight and narrow by having a course of Instruction running through the Term into which he was asked to fit. But not having had that guidance I felt that if this is to be my last sermon on which my future depends I could not do better than to devote this short talk to thinking about the most basic of all our values - the concept of TRUTH, on which everything else depends.

No flights of speculation or imagination, no aesthetic pleasure or delight, no experience of love, have any value which are not rested in Truth. "Truth alone is worthy of our entire devotion." Truth takes precedence over everything. What do we mean by Truth? It is the correspondence between our own thought and an objective reality outside ourselves. The first thing about which we need to be truthful is ourselves. We need to take stock of ourselves and try to assess accurately the circumstances in which Almighty God has placed us - the circumstances of time and sex and colour which he has chosen for each one of us from all eternity. We need to go further and to try and identify the whole complex pattern - no less surely chosen by Almighty God - of gifts and handicaps which is the character of each one of us. And having identified them as accurately as we can, we have then to accept them not sullenly, unwillingly, because we can have no other, but whole-heartedly, lovingly and gratefully as the choice of Almighty God and therefore the best possible.

Truthfulness in this self-estimate is the first step in the spiritual life. It is, of course, what we mean really by humility - the foundation of all virtues. Humility has got a bad name because it is so frequently thought of as being a denigration of ourselves, often of doubtful sincerity, as compared to other people. And of course, it is no such thing. It is a comparison, not to ourselves with other people - they don't enter the proposition at all - it is the putting of our own nothingness before the limitless perfection of Almighty God. Our neighbour doesn't come into it. This acceptance, of course, does not mean that we give way to the weaknesses of our character but that we recognise them, accept them as an objective fact, do all in our power to overcome them, and are not discouraged by our failures to do so, knowing that the weaknesses, however much we may succeed in disciplining them, will be with us to the end. Above all we need to avoid those fruitless flights into unreality, wishing that we were of another colour, or race or class or that we were born in another period of time, or of other parents or that we were free of those faults of character which we find so humiliating. Having, so far as we can, established the truth about ourselves we shall be struck by our own inadequacy. Not only did we not make ourselves: we cannot satisfy or fulfil ourselves. We are not absolute and self-fulfilling beings and so we are constantly striving outside ourselves. When we strive towards creatures for our fulfilment we are courting certain disappointment - whether they are our fellow human beings or whether they are impersonal concepts - such as ambition or wealth or lust: none of these can satisfy us for they are as relative and fickle and changeable as we are ourselves.

"God alone suffices," as the great St Teresa of Avila says. To go back centuries to those wonderful words which the Book of Deuteronomy puts into the mouth of Moses, "He is a God of Truth, and without iniquity, Just and Right is He." He is Truth itself and, as the Catechism has it, "can neither deceive nor be deceived".

All I have said so far, is concerned with Truth in the natural order but when the Word, very God himself, takes manhood, full of grace and truth in order to reveal to us a whole cycle of knowledge beyond human reason he gives the Truth as the whole purpose of the Incarnation. At the most solemn moment of his life when he was on trial before Pilate, he says: "For this was I born and for this came I into the world, that I should give testimony to the Truth." You see all the things that people now connect with Christianity - the service of God and of our fellow man - are the consequences of its being true. Dogma always takes precedence over morals. Morals are dogma applied and would be valueless if not established on the foundation of Truth. So it is that the Church which continues the redemptive work of Christ is described by St Paul as "the pillar and the ground of truth". The more you think about it, the more you will appreciate that this obsession with Truth is the characteristic note of the Catholic Church.

Nearly all the non-Catholic presentations of Christianity with which we are familiar would seem to put the whole emphasis on Morality and to regard Dogma or Truth as something secondary, to be relegated to subsequent discussion - a point of view which all of us must have heard popularly expressed as "It doesn't matter what a man believes so long as he does what's right." And at a more serious level we see that point of view vitiating theological discussion which so often takes the form not of trying to discover and accept the Truth Christ taught and what the Church had taught and continues to teach in His name, but rather how far personal opinions can be reconciled with other personal opinions without doing violence to either. It is a whole difference between an objective and subjective approach. Once we have appreciated that difference, we are able to understand those aspects of the Catholic Church which are so often a stumbling block to our separated Brethren - her passion for definition, for inerrancy, for visible unity - in a word, for Truth. We do well in times like these to be making acts of Faith in her, knowing well that she cannot fail. Her policy, her discipline, her worship, even, may appear to be in a state of disarray compared to that which we have been accustomed, but we know with the certainty of Faith that she can never impose on us as a condition of membership the acceptance of that which is untrue: we know that her Sacraments cannot fail in their efficacy. Membership of her, in the words of the great Lord Acton, is "dearer to us than life itself"."

On the occasion of his 94th birthday, Monsignor Gilbey said: "You may have the idea that you must leave the world a better place, but the whole emphasis of our lives is to give ourselves to the purpose of Almighty God. I cannot put it better than St. Peter of Alcantara. 'You and I must first be what we ought to beÉ let each one do the same, and all will be well.' "