A Nasty Man Like Me

A look at the last interview given by Msgr Alfred Gilbey, one of the "Trad Godfathers" of the Traditionalist Movement in the United Kingdom.

He got permission to continue to celebrate the Traditional Mass after 1971.

From One Peter Five

By the Hon. Joseph Shaw, DPhil(Oxon), FRSA, Chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales and President of Fœderatio Internationalis Una Voce

The Absolute Uniqueness of Monsignor Alfred Gilbey. By Alexander Haydon (Arouca Press, 2025)

To say Monsignor Alfrey Gilbey (1901-1998), a priest with English and Spanish heritage, was an eccentric, would be misleading. If he appeared in a novel or on the screen, as a figure of the 1980s or 1990s, the average audience’s suspension of disbelief would be wholly inadequate to the task. He was regarded as impossibly old-fashioned when he resigned as Catholic Chaplain to Cambridge University in 1965, having held the position since 1932, because of his opposition to the merging of the pastoral care for male and female students. He appeared in later decades like a time-traveller from another age. He got permission to continue to celebrate the Traditional Mass after 1971: it is impossible to imagine anything else. He said it daily, behind a thick curtain in a side chapel of the London Oratory, at a rather fast pace, at 7 o’clock in the morning, like a fossil retaining its shape from a bygone era.

He was not a mere freak, however. He remained until very late in his extraordinarily long life full of vigour, witty, erudite, and, above all, kind. The kindness extended to taxi-drivers and to people he met in the train; it lit upon the spiritual above all, and could take a brusque form. ‘So, what do you think is going to happen when you die?’ He was the instrument, under providence, of a staggering number of converts, and the dispenser of advice, always sensible, sometimes life-changing, to a large network of devoted friends. These friends were, it must be said, overwhelmingly male, and his apostolate was directed chiefly, if certainly not solely, to the budding elite of Cambridge students, and to the established elite of English society.

No priest and no human being can reach everyone, even everyone in a medium-sized town, and there is no shame in having skills particularly suited to this or that sub-group. His appreciation of the fact that men and women are not interchangeable social units put him, in fact, ahead of his time. Speaking of the Cambridge Chaplaincy, he explained that the problem had been in part the small number of female students at the time.

There’s no earthly way of making a whole of 25 women and 200 men. You kill the nature of the place as it is. Men’s society with men is a quite different thing to mixed society. You kill it at one fell blow without having a balanced complement.

He brought to his elite followers something they perhaps needed more than most: a child-like spiritual simplicity; an iron confidence in the truths of the Faith; and a unwavering adherence to the Faith’s practical implications.

The Mass is a wonderful wonderful thing! I set it out years ago in my speech on my fiftieth anniversary of ordination, how most things in life lose their awe and majesty and wonder by constant repetition. Not so the priesthood [long pause]. Never, never can one celebrate Mass without awe and wonder!

Gilbey was a man of particularism: an appreciator of God’s artistry in creating something unrepeatable in each and every thing that He made.

Egalitarianism is that philosophy which believes that all men … are born equal. Well, that, of course, is balderdash. They’re not! It’s all part of the entirely erroneous theory that presumes that we come out on a belt, from a sort of producer! … Everything in creation, right down to you and me sitting here now, is unique, and not ‘equal’—a cruel word, has no meaning. There’s no way in which you and I are equal to one another.

Again: “Egalitarianism goes round with this mad idea that we’re all square pegs—or round, as the case may be—and that we can be put from one hole into another.”

This made him sensitive to the needs of different kinds of people – such as young men and women – and the differing conditions of different times. Talking about the social sanctions which once applied to the divorced and remarried, with them not being received in society, in his own lifetime, he went on:

Once society ceases to support Christian morality, the individual cannot, and should not, apply a social sanction. It’s wholly ineffective. It isn’t morality that’s changed. But so long as society supported, by and large, Christian morality, people really had a duty to support that society and coincide with it.

Living through both World Wars, and then the sexual revolution, forced Gilbey to be clear about what could change, and what could not: what was a necessary adaptation to social and economic circumstances, and what was a harmful amnesia about vital spiritual truths.

[T]he approach nowadays is: ‘Now, here is a very complicated problem. How can we solve it? Can we solve it with the least infliction of human suffering?’ The answer to that is: we don’t start at that end. We start at the end of there being a moral order, stemming immediately from Him Who has brought us into being.

Religion, he reminds us, is not about feelings, not least because one cannot control one’s feelings, including what we enjoy or don’t enjoy.

People think [about sin]: ‘I’ve got to wish I hadn’t.’ Yes, in one sense, because if you persist in that course you go to Hell. But to say: ‘I didn’t enjoy it’ is nonsense. I did! And I look back, saying: ‘I did, and were it not for Hell, I would very likely return to the practices which I’ve now abandoned because I know they’re wrong, and they’re going to destroy me utterly in this world and the next.’

Asked about his happiest moment, Gilbey responded by rejecting a conception of happiness based on feelings.

Feelings only help me towards happiness. You have to make happiness! But, looking back over my 94 years, what is the most important thing, from the point of view of what it gave me? Ordination to the priesthood—yes! That’s will, not feeling! Happiness isn’t anything to do with your feelings. Having peace of mind.

Alexander Haydon conducted this multi-session, wide-ranging interview with Gilbey in his extreme old age, but this age was also in a curious way his prime, the height of his popularity and influence, and the apogee of his historical perspective. He had seen society travel the downward slope into modernity, towards standardisation and mass production, and his eccentricity was a trumpet-blast of defiance to this process. He has also seen many phases of reaction against it, and many attempts to renegotiate modernity, community, and equality, from Francoism in the 1930s to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Through it all he retained his love of the Mass, of the Faith, of God, and of his fellow men, a love that was not sentimental but – as he would be the first insist – an act of will. He was a witness to the Faith that endures, and the Grace that can overcome all obstacles.

Change and decay all around I see.
O Thou, who changest not, abide with me.

Catholics will be grateful for this reminder of the astounding figure of Mgr Alfred Gilbey, who is in danger of being forgotten, which brings out so vividly, in his own words, his wit, his steadfastness, and his kindness to others. Alexander Haydon has done us a great service in drawing out this fascinating figure, a powerful active ingredient in English Catholic life from the age of Ronnie Knox to the time of Tony Blair.