High up in the Vosges, crowning a mountain, stands the sanctuary of Ste Odile. Below there stretches the immense plain of the Lower Rhine, with the spire of Strasbourg Cathedral rising in the middle distance. For thirteen hundred years, amidst all the conflicts that have marked the history of Alsace, it has remained a point of rest. It was here, at the end of October, that there took place the third International Liturgical Conference sponsored by the Liturgical Institute of Trier and the Centre de Pastorale Liturgique of Paris. There could have been no more appropriate meeting-place for a work of reconciliation, for such is the purpose of these gatherings bringing together liturgical scholars and pastoral clergy from ten different countries, all alike concerned to render more effective the redemptive work of Christ which the Liturgy exists to declare and continue.

Previous meetings at Luxembourg and Maria-Laach had evoked the sympathetic interest of the Sacred Congregation of Rites. Indeed the text of the restored Paschal Vigil issued in 1950 may be said to be a triumphant vindication, of the work of liturgical reform, and that precisely in the direction of the conference’s own efforts. For the Or do Sabbati Sancti is not just a piece of liturgical scholarship, designed to restore with archaeological accuracy a rite whose significance had been largely lost. It is all that, but much more is it a bold attempt to make the liturgical action a mystery in which the Christian people share. Hence the emphasis on a reduction and a simplification of the symbolism of the rite, so that the central theme of death and resurrection, darkness and light, may stand revealed in all its strength. Hence, too, the provision that the congregation should at this point of the Christian mystery, and in their own language, renew the baptismal vows which the Paschal rite enshrines.