Retired Bishop Gilson Dies
Episcopal News Service. August 21, 1980 [80269]
NEW LONDON, N.H. -- The Rt. Rev. Charles Packard Gilson, retired Suffragan Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Honolulu (now Hawaii), died here on August 11 of heart failure. He was 80 years of age.
Bishop Gilson was elected to the episcopacy by the General Convention of the Church in 1961 at Detroit and he was consecrated during the Convention at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Detroit. This was the first time in 30 years that a bishop had been consecrated at a General Convention. None has been consecrated in that setting since then.
Bishop Gilson's consecration was also of historical importance because for the first time in the Episcopal Church, prelates of the Philippine Independent Church and the Polish National Church of America joined in the apostolic laying-on-of-hands.
Bishop Gilson had been missionary-in-charge at Taipei, Taiwan since 1958 and, as suffragan bishop, was assigned to continue there from 1961 to 1964. He was also assigned jurisdiction over Okinawa from 1964 to 1967.
He was ordained a deacon in 1950 and a priest in 1953 -- at the age of 53 -- after a long business career with the Bank of America and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.
Born in Portland, Maine, Sept. 3, 1899, he received his B.S. degree from Dartmouth College in 1921. He attended Central Theological School in Shanghai, China. He was awarded honorary degrees from Dartmouth and Seabury-Western Theological Seminary.
He went to the Philippines in 1945 with the American Red Cross, serving with the Army there and in Japan. When the Communists took over China, he returned to the United States.
From 1951 to 1955 he served various congregations in the Diocese of Rhode Island and was archdeacon of the diocese from 1955 to 1958, at which time he went to Taiwan as a missionary.
In 1923 he married Dorothy Alice Jenks, who, with their two children, survives. A funeral service was held on August 15 at St. Andrew's Church here.