Mgr Gilbey, excluder of women

I AM (HAD Monsignor Gilbey had so many friends (3 April), but you should not be canonising bigotry.
I was shocked when I went to Cambridge from my convent school in 1959 to find that the Church authorities were allowing this man to bar women students, not only from his chaplaincy premises at Fisher House, but from Mass at his chapel.
Catholic women students like me soon realised that this was permitted only because Gilbey was financing Fisher House from the profits of Gilbey's Gin.
A separate chaplaincy had to be set up for Catholic women because of Gilbey's intransigence; it is not true that "there was not enough space" at Fisher House. There were only a handful of women Catholic students anyway, and fewer still as a result of this clerical apartheid. One of my fellow students, turned out of a Fisher House Mass by the Monsignor, decided she had had quite enough of the Catholic Church.
Gilbey was heard to say,. about this time, that women had been admitted to: membership of the Univere sky (in 1949) against hisexpress wishes, and he was. not going to let them into hie chaplaincy.
I wonder where the "unique holiness" of the Monsignor lay.
Patricia Wheeler London Ni WHAT A delight to see the tributes in your pages to a wonderful and humble priest in Mgr' Gilbey.
He was a reminder to us all that there was once a gentler and more civilised age.
Name and address supplied.