It is just fifty years since the inception of the liturgical movement associated with the great Benedictine abbey of Maria Laach in the Rhineland. What has come to be known as the theologia lacensis, the theology of Laach, is only the doctrinal side of a multiple appeal to the Catholic world to foster its truest insights, an appeal which goes out just as much in the way the monks worship in the ancient basilica and in the works of religious art that come from the ateliers. But whatever the place and importance of other aspects of this manifold undertaking, the theological ideas which derive from Maria Laach have proved by far its most decisive influence on the general life of the Church. The most characteristic of these ideas are those of Dom Odo Casel. Born at Coblenz in 1886, he entered the monastery in 1905 and was soon caught up in the liturgical and patristic research which was to form his life's work.

‘Relationship is the soul of casework’ says Fr Biestek at the beginning of his book on the Casework Relationship. The forming of relationships between persons is one of the basic necessities of life, for man was made a social being. Relationship comes into every sort of personal and social situation. Nevertheless, the use of relationship in a particular way and for a particular purpose is the essential and basic factor in social work. It is, as Fr Biestek says, the ‘soul’ of casework and without it social work would be lifeless and meaningless. The theory of relationship in social work has been analysed by some of the ablest thinkers in the social work field. My aim in this paper is not to recapitulate what is in the text books or to attempt to summarise the literature about relationship. To do this would be both boring and ineffective.

There was a day when you could have heard it said that theologians knew nothing about the liturgy, and conversely, that liturgists knew very little theology. That misinformed attitude has disappeared, and it is now recognized that theological and liturgical studies enrich and complement one another. There cannot be two Gods—one for theologians, another for liturgists. The Church simultaneously instructs our minds through dogma and our hearts through symbol. The liturgy would be no more than exaggerated drama without roots deep in the truths theology defends and explains; and were it not for the living contact with Truth found in the liturgy, theology would be only an elaborate system of religious mathematics.

One consequence of this necessary and dynamic interaction between theology and the liturgy is that many of the problems encountered in the worship of God find their solution in theological principles.

For many of us, as for the Mari tains, the impact of Chartres is a cumulative experience that reaches its climax at suitable altitude, perhaps halfway up the clocher neuf, or circling at some point those ‘outer balconies, high above ground, through an unbelievable entanglement of arches and buttresses'. From that scaffolding that suspends one between roofs and towers, there is nothing left but the final admiration … ‘the unity and harmony of so much lofty beauty could have as its foundation only the unity of truth'. Having left beneath one the particular beauties of stained glass, of proportions, of sumptuous effects, here, it is the anatomy of the Church, spread out beneath one as it might be for the blessed Damosel, that impresses the memory with something absolute.

For it is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.

That is how St Paul speaks of the plan of redemption to his converts at Corinth. And now here is Shakespeare showing man as instrumental in ‘declaring the glory of the Lord'. It is a passage from King Lear where the king, cast out into the storm by his unnatural daughters, sees, for the first time it may be, the close kinship of us all.