Fr Lang and Archbishop Ranjith

Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith, the Secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship, shakes hands with Fr Michael Lang of the London Oratory after the launch of the Italian version of his book Turning Towards the Lord

In his Foreward to the book, the then Cardinal Ratzinger wrote "At a propitious moment it seems to me, this book resumes a debate that, despite appearances to the contrary, has never really gone away, not even after the Second Vatican Council. The Innsbruck liturgist, Josef Andreas Jungmann, one of the architects of the Council's Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, was from teh very beginning resolutely opposed to the polemical catchphrase that previously the priest celebrated 'with his badk to the people'; he emphasised that what was at issue was not the priest turning away from teh people but, on the contrary, his facing the same direction as the people.

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