"What we previously knew only in theory has become for us a practical experience: the Church stands and falls with the Liturgy. When the adoration of the divine Trinity declines, when the faith no longer appears in its fullness in the Liturgy of the Church, when man's words, his thoughts, his intentions are suffocating him, then faith will have lost the place where it is expressed and where it dwells. For that reason, the true celebration of the Sacred Liturgy is the centre of any renewal of the church whatever." Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

But how, today, at the begining of the third millennium, do we achieve "the true celebration of the Liturgy"? Is the answer a wholesale return to the traditional rites? Is it in accepting a wide diversity of divergent uses - new, old and incluturated - in the Roman rite? Or is it in seeking an official reform of the liturgical reform that followed the Second Vatican Council?

These are the issues that were discussed in the presence of Cardinal Ratzinger at the conference held at the Abbey of Notre-Dame at Fontgombault from July 22nd-24th 2001. This volume makes available in English translation the papers from that conference - papers which inform and challenge, and which make a significant contribution to the consideration of the question of the Liturgy in our day.