Piers Plowman at Vatican II

Extract

The front cover of the Penguin paperback Piers the Ploughman shows a woodcut of Langland lying beside a Malvern stream watching his vision of Piers. Piers is plowing the field of the world—there are the jackdaws flapping up out of the furrows and the sun shining hotly. Piers is giving Will a straight look, and Will is looking back: respectful, but a little dull and sheepish. They are both, naturally, barefoot. Then this other book, in covers exceedingly hard, and with no woodcut, opens to page thirty-five and, after a pointed quotation from St Augustine, commences a summary: ‘The Church needs, not only one to form her in the first place, but always, because she is deformed, a reformer. And this is Christ himself. This is why, throughout everything that we must not shirk saying, and in painful compassion and sorrowfully recognizing our co-responsibility, about the shadow-side of the Church, yet we can always firmly believe, in glad and unshakable faith, not in a sinful Church but in the holy Church.’ And further down the page (of The Council, Reform and Reunion) Hans Küng goes on: ‘ . . . insofar as God’s holy Church is a Church of men and sinful men, she, with everything that she is and has, is subject to that word of the Lord which reads “Do penance and be converted.” Insofar as the Church is deformed, she has to be reformed: ecclesia reformanda.’