Fanatics and Humor

For fanatics choose a part and parade it as though it were the whole, as the history of heresy illustrates. Factionalism is humourless.

But the saints are never the kind of killjoy spinster aunts who go in for faultfinding and lack all sense of humour...For humour is a mysterious but unmistakable charism inseparable from Catholic faith, and neither the ‘progressives’ nor the ‘integralists’ seems to possess it—the latter even less than the former. Both of these tend to be faultfinders, malicious satirists, grumblers, carping critics, full of bitter scorn, know-it-alls who think they have the monopoly of infallible judgement; they are self-legitimising prophets—in short, fanatics.

—Hans Urs von Balthasar (1974) quoted in Philip McCosker, "Blessed Tension: Barth and Von Balthasar on the Music of Mozart" (2005)