John William Hunwicke, R.I.P.

The requiem for the repose of the soul of John William Hunwicke took place on June 4, 2024, at eleven a.m. in the Oxford Oratory Catholic Church. It was a solemn Mass, celebrated by the provost of the Oratory, Fr. Nicholas Edmonds-Smith. Clergy in choir chanted the De Profundis and Miserere mei at the reception of the Body and the responses at the absolution. The Oratory schola sang plainsong and polyphony at the appropriate points, and Fr. Oliver Craddock, the deacon of the Mass, sang the Gospel beautifully. Like other young Oxford Oratorians, he had benefited from Latin lessons given by Fr. Hunwicke and had the singular honor of being the priest at the burial in the cemetery at Kennington, the suburb of Oxford where Fr. Hunwicke had lived.

It is unusual to begin a memoir with an account of the funeral. However, in these days and in these parts, a month or more often passes between a death and the burial, permitting a more leisurely reflection. Fr. Hunwicke’s funeral reflected the life of the deceased particularly well, and highlighted his extraordinary contribution—in more than once sense “extraordinary.” There was no homily or eulogy and neither photograph nor biography on the Order of Service (let alone the ubiquitous “Thanksgiving for the Life of . . .”) Of the dozen or so clergy in choir, four or five were priests of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham and a couple more were in the congregation. They had travelled a long way to be there. I noticed both the present chairman of the Latin Mass Society, Dr. Joseph Shaw, and his predecessor, Julian Chadwick, amongst a substantial congregation, well able to appreciate a liturgy in which no English was spoken. The only mention of the deceased by name was of “Joannis Sacerdotis,” during the Absolutio. I also encountered one priest, a former pupil of Hunwicke, in collar and old school tie.

Fr. John Hunwicke emerged from the secluded life of a schoolmaster to become eventually—thanks to the Internet—one of the best-known voices in English-speaking traditionalist Catholicism. To understand him it is essential to understand something of the English Anglican culture in which he had lived. “Public school,” “Anglo-Papalism,” “Catholicism,” “Ordinariate”: these are all words found well beyond England but often meaning different things. So “public school” in England denotes private education, whereas elsewhere more obviously it would mean state-funded education. “Anglo-Papalism” in England means not so much a penchant for papist practices and Romish doctrines as the conviction that, at the Reformation, the provinces of Canterbury and York were wrested from the Holy See by coup d’état and that priests and people in their parishes should resist this change by continuing to practice Catholicism as faithfully as they could. Often their practice would include the privilege of clerical matrimony and almost always it would mean celebrating the Roman Mass in English, using texts translated by Thomas Cranmer and Myles Coverdale and the early twentieth-century compilers of the Anglican Missal and English Missal. Though greatly enthusiastic about the production of Divine Worship: The Missal, the missal of the Ordinariates, as the furtherance, and arguably the culmination, of what had been an Anglo-Papalist project, Fr. Hunwicke’s personal preference was to celebrate the pre-conciliar Mass, usually on his altar at home. One is reminded of Dom Gregory Dix, himself an Anglican Benedictine, and an earlier authority on matters liturgical, who celebrated a private Mass in Latin daily.

It is also worth noting that whereas words like “papist” and “Romish” have a pejorative tone, “Anglo-Papalists,” proud of having been persecuted in the nineteenth century for their beliefs, rejoice in such terms, just as Anglo-Catholics (sometimes to the puzzlement of others) often refer to themselves simply as “Catholics.”

Then there is that word “Ordinariate.” In some circles it has been used exclusively to describe the Ordinariates of Our Lady of Walsingham in the United Kingdom, the Chair of Saint Peter in North America, and Our Lady of the Southern Cross in Australia. In fact “Ordinariate” is simply an ecclesiological term, encountered for example in the way that some military chaplaincies are constituted. For our purposes “Ordinariate” is the way the Holy See has administered groups of former Anglicans received into the Catholic Church following Pope Benedict XVI’s Anglicanorum cœtibus in 2009. We can now see more clearly what it means to say that John Hunwicke taught for nearly thirty years in a public school and that he was a committed Anglo-Papalist whose understanding of Catholicism led him eventually to join the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham and be (re-)ordained as a Catholic priest. I say “(re-)ordained” because he was a persuasive exponent of the doctrine of the “Dutch touch.” The “Dutch touch”—a phrase invented by Fr. Hunwicke himself—referred to the participation of Old Catholic bishops in Anglican episcopal consecrations during the 1930s. Whether he believed this doctrine to the end one cannot be sure. He would have been horrified—had he discovered it—that in 2023 Dutch Touch was the name of something described as a “captivating and eye-catching anthology of European-flavored gay films.”

After reading Literæ Humaniores (classics) at Hertford College, Oxford, John Hunwicke went on to Saint Stephen’s House (Staggers), the Anglo-Catholic seminary in Oxford. He served a curacy or two: Beaconsfield, Diocese of Oxford, (1967–1970) and Saint Paul’s, Walworth, and Saint Michael’s, Camberwell, Diocese of Southwark (1970–73) and then became a classics master at Lancing College, West Sussex, where he stayed for nearly thirty years. Lancing was founded by Canon Nathaniel Woodard just over one hundred seventy-five years ago. There are a couple dozen Woodard Schools, mostly independent, preserving the ethos not only of a good general education but of a specifically Christian one. Lancing College Chapel, where Fr. Hunwicke served as assistant chaplain, was certainly “high,” the loftiest of school chapels. In another sense, none was “higher” than Fr. Hunwicke (almost never “Fr. John”), who published entertaining and scholarly liturgical footnotes in his annual (Anglican) Ordo.

Once the Internet was established, and Fr. Hunwicke was safely aboard the barque of Peter, the footnotes of his Ordo were re-invented as “Liturgical Notes,” delighting traditional Catholics throughout the English-speaking world. Later the blog became “Mutual Enrichment,” alluding to a process outlined by Pope Benedict XVI in 2007 in which the “Ordinary Form” of the Mass should be enriched by—and enrich—the “Extraordinary Form” (the pre-conciliar rite as consolidated in 1962). Traditionis custodes presented Fr. Hunwicke with a particular challenge: “PF” or “Bergoglio”—the forms of reference he used—was undermining, in his view, what Pope Benedict had achieved, and Hunwicke fought hard for the traditionalist cause.

The ecclesiastical authorities always regarded Fr. Hunwicke as a tricky customer. Archetypically Anglo-Catholic, he was clever, humorous, and mischievous, and could not easily be constrained. Those who got to know him found him loyal, personable, and warm. His ordination in the Catholic Church was a year later than the clergy who “crossed the Tiber” with him, and several influential Catholics behind the scenes championed his case. I myself was involved in a final interview: I had been at a similar interview in 2007, when he applied for the post of Saint Thomas the Martyr, Oxford, where he served for four years before becoming a Catholic. In the first case I was the provincial episcopal visitor, in Hunwicke’s view, his bishop, interceding with the Archdeacon of Oxford. I remember that he corrected the quantity of a Latin vowel I used in a phrase: I reminded him at the end of the interview that it was not prudent for the interviewee to correct the Latin of the interviewer!

In the second case I was by now an Ordinariate priest interceding with the local bishop who looked after Oxfordshire on behalf of the Archbishop of Birmingham. Once admitted as a priest of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, Fr. Hunwicke helped out, as needed, in the Oxford Mission but soon found his way back to the Oxford Oratory, where the Oxford Mission had begun. He helped the younger Oratorians with their Latin—he was by all accounts a superb teacher—and made himself useful to the Latin Mass Society. Whenever I bumped into Fr. Hunwicke he always greeted me warmly and inquired after the health of the “episcopa.” Though he was fearless in the fight, and formidable in the faith, he did say to me once, when I dropped him off at home (he was, of course, far too clever to be able to drive), that neither of the projects to which he had devoted so much time—the traditional Latin Mass and the Ordinariate liturgy, with its beauty of language and recovery of so much that was lost in the 1970 reforms—would prevail to become the future of Roman Catholic praxis. He and I agreed nonetheless that there should remain a place for both and that that was a struggle in which it was worthwhile to engage. Accordingly he responded to invitations to lecture from far and wide. No other Ordinariate priest was as widely known, or made the authorities more nervous.

A week before he died of cancer, Fr. Hunwicke inserted a note into his blog: “The Pancreatic nastiness stops me from getting out to Libraries and Archives; so bits of these pieces are lifted.” &c. Startlingly, “Fr Hunwicke’s Mutual Enrichment” continued after his death: he posted some repeats of previous years’ entries ahead of time. It is to be hoped that his blog will survive not only in the extended universe of the Internet but in an admissible space, perhaps as a printed book. Though many of the entries were time-specific, and some were acerbic, most were—variously—arcane, corrective, erudite, and informative, often all of these at once.

Fr. Hunwicke was happily married to Pamela for fifty-seven years. They met as fellow classicists in Oxford. They had three daughters and two sons, and most of the family, grandchildren included, was able to be present at his bedside when he died peacefully, re-inforced by the rites of the Church. For him April 30 would have been the feast of Saint Catherine of Siena, herself a galvanizer of reigning popes. Followers of modern calendars would have kept her feast the day before, on the actual anniversary of her death.