As he was later to put it, "She possessed the faith to the marrow of her bones." Hers, in other words, was that profoundly pious but blinkered religious outlook which cloistered such well-to-do Spaniards of that day from all other churches and beliefs. He derived his vision of Catholicism principally from his mother, Maria Victoria de Ysasi, born in the sherry-producing town of Jerez-de-la-Frontera. He represented the triumph of hope over experience for those who still longed for the "conversion of England" (back to the "one true faith")Īlfred Gilbey was brought up at the family home of Mark Hall near Harlow in Essex and was sent, in 1914, to what was then England's most fashionable Jesuit school, Beaumont College in Old Windsor. Though not born into this world himself, he became its most enduring hero. Gilbey's adherence however, to pre- Conciliar ideals endeared him to the world of England's "old Catholic families". The overturning of these notions at the Second Vatican Council in 1962 became the main ground for "traditional" Catholic resistance to ecumenism and an updated vision of the Church. That his death marks the end of an era is a cliche that, for once, is literally true. Spiritually and psychologically he remained undetachable from the late Victorian world, espousing a brand of Catholicism that was Roman rather than, in any way, ecumenical, and English rather than, in any way, Irish. Rather, he was the archetypical Roman Catholic University chaplain for the England of the 19th century. For he did not just "act as" - in the popular but distinctly non-Gilbeian phrase - Catholic chaplain at Cambridge University for 33 years. Indeed, it was precisely for what he was that he was so well known. Monsignor Alfred Gilbey was probably the best-known Roman Catholic priest in England during the last quarter-century.
"THE LAST thing I want," said Alfred Gilbey one evening after dinner, "is to have an obituary about me saying what I did, rather than what I tried to be."
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