It might seem excessive to claim that a Belgian diocesan congress, held fifty years ago, could mark a decisive date in the history of the Church. But it was the Congress called at Liege in 1909 to further an interest in the Liturgy, inspired by a young monk of Mont Cesar, Dom Lambert Beauduin, that was the true beginning of the modern liturgical revival, and the radical changes of recent years have their root in his prophetic understanding of the authentic place of the liturgy in the life of the Church. He freed the Liturgy from all that was antiquarian or derived: he saw it as the Piété de I’Eglise (the title of his first and fundamental book) and St Pius X found in him the most faithful interpreter of his intention to restore the Liturgy to the Church as its ‘most authentic form of Christian piety’.

It was small wonder that the Centre de Pastorale Liturgique, and the vigorous pastoral-liturgical movement that grew up in France after 1945, found in Dom Beauduin its patron and principal inspiration. He was in fact by then, and had been for some years, living in virtual exile from his native Belgium. For Dom Beauduin had an even greater claim to the gratitude of the Church as the Benedictine monk who had responded to Pope Pius XI’s appeal to the Order to undertake the cause of Christian unity. He was the founder of the monastery of Amay (since established at Chevetogne) in which Eastern and Western traditions were equally honoured, a place of reconciliation where the divisions of Christendom could, if not altogether be healed, at least be considered in the context of charity.