Fr Hunwicke And Standup Comedy

When I was a lot younger, I had a friend who was an aspiring comic (he wound up working for American Greetings writing gag lines, so he had talent). I used to go to his routines on amateur night at the comedy clubs to support him, so I wound up learning a little about the business. One thing a comic has to do is put his best material up front and time it so the audience gets into the habit of laughing. Then he puts the not-so-funny stuff into the mix, and even if the joke is just "it rained last Tuesday", the audience still laughs.

Fr Hunwicke, as far as I can tell, is thought in some quarters to be funny. His problem is he ran out of good material years ago, but he keeps posting the C-minus stuff, day in, day out. Let's look at a random recent post, the one he had up yesterday, Der Fuehrerbefehl. A Fuehrerbefehl is an order from the Fuehrer, viz, Hitler. I assume he's drawing some sort of parallel between that and a motu proprio. ROTFL, huh? But then he starts off,

Many of you will be too young to remember the infamous events of 1962. They led to famine and public disorder; to mobs of crazed people jostling in the streets as they struggled in the queues to register for their unemployment benefit and for hand-outs of public foodstuffs. Gaunt and famished, in country after country the hungry men, driven to despair, protested in the only way they knew. The barricades ... the street massacres ...

The cruel decree Veterum Sapientia had ordered the sacking of thousands of men, and some women, from Catholic seminaries throughout the world. Papa Roncalli, "Good Pope John XXIII" as he had ironically been called, in full consciousness of His authority, Decreed and Commanded eight important rules. Rule 5 ordered that the major sacred sciences should be taught in Latin, that the professors of these sciences in universities or seminaries be required to speak Latin and to make use of textbooks written in Latin.

So my reaction was. "huh? wha?" Fr Hunwicke's timing was way off, first a Hitler joke that wasn't funny and then a pedantic detour into the alternate universe that had nothing to do with the Hitler joke. By the next paragraph, we learn this has something to do with "Good Pope John XXIII" (clearly uttered with a sneer), who is being characterized as something between Hitler and an out-of-touch fuddy-duddy. The general idea might work for a speaker trying to warm up a Klan meeting, but the references are too obscure, and the tone is too preciously literary, so it won't even work for the Klan, though comparing a pope to Hitler isn't a good strategy for Catholics, either.

(In fact, I went to Veterum Sapientia and found most of it unexceptionable):

As is laid down in Canon Law (can. 1364) or commanded by Our Predecessors, before Church students begin their ecclesiastical studies proper they shall be given a sufficiently lengthy course of instruction in Latin by highly competent masters, following a method designed to teach them the language with the utmost accuracy.

Fr Hunwicke himself affects a level of erudition that would only look down on anyone not fully competent in Latin. It would seem that, leaving his immediate personal agenda aside, there's little for him to disagree with otherwise here.

In fact, it appears there's little discussion on the web covering this particular constitution and its history, but it actually seems like an interesting case and worthy of real investigation, not summary dismissal. But we're back to Fr Hunwicke's alternate universe:

In Argentina, no bishop was more rigorous than Bishop Bergoglio in enforcing the decrees of S John XXIII. If ever he heard of a seminary professor giving a single lecture in Spanish rather than Latin, he was instantly on the phone demanding that the man be sacked. He had the reputation of being the strictest bishop in Latin America in implementing Veterum Sapientia.

Of course, nothing like this actually took place, and Hunwicke's point is obscure. A rhetorical journey ino the alternate universe must be apt. The problem for the metaphorical structure here is that Hitler is likened to John XXIII is likened to Francis, but the result is that the three figures merge into a single raging apocalyptic fuddy-duddy, which doesn't work. Wouldn't it be even a little easier to say flat-out that the Bishops of Rome are the Antichrist? There's a problem here, because a certain no-Popery is lurking behind this whole metaphor. Once you accept one pope as Hitler, you open Pandora's box. The nicest thing you can say about Hunwicke's argument is that it's shallow and puerile.

But then he gets to his overall point:

Our privilege today, in 2021, is that we are being given a very similar opportunity for total and unthinking obedience, Jesuit style. Pope Francis possesses precisely and exactly the same authority as S John XXIII. When he decrees the extermination of the Old Mass, that decree comes to us with precisely and exactly the same force as the requirement of S John XXIII that all Priestly Formation in seminaries should be done entirely in Latin ... er ... except that possibly a motu proprio may not have ...um ... quite the authority of an Apostolic Constitution ... er ... . I wouldn't know about that sort of thing; I'm only a 'convert'.

For starters, he makes two inaccurate assertions, or suggestionis, or whatever they are. He claims Francis "decrees the extermination of the Old Mass", which he clearly didn't; nobody says that. Nor (since I went back and read Veterum Sapientia) did John XXIII decree that "all Priestly Formation in seminaries should be done entirely in Latin", he wanted only the theology courses in Latin.

But here's the problem. Fr Hunwicke clearly doesn't like John XXIII; after all, he called the Second Council. He clearly doesn't like Francis, he's a tool of the globalists or something. But he likes Benedict XVI, because he issued Summorum Pontificum and Anglicanorum coetibus. So his point is that we should follow one set of apostolic constitutions/motu proprios but not another, apparently based entirely on whether he likes the pope involved.

This is meaningless. But more important for the point here, it isn't even funny. It's a lot of unfunny stuff inserted in the routine, when he hasn't got the audience into the habit or either laughing or nodding assent.

BOOO! GET BETTER MATERIAL!