In his own foreward to the book, Cardinal Ratzinger compares this work to a much earlier classic of the same title by Romano Guardini because Ratzinger feels that his insights here are similar with what Guardini achieved in his time regarding a renewed understanding of the Liturgy. My purpose here is to assist this renewal of understanding of the Liturgy. Its basic intentions coincide with what Guardini wanted to achieve. The only difference is that I have had to translate what Guardini did at the end of the First World War, in a totally different historical situation, into the context of our present-day questions, hopes and dangers. Like Guardini, I am not attempting to involve myself with scholarly discussion and research. I am simply offering an aid to the understanding of the faith and to the right way to give the faith its central form of expression in the Liturgy.

    It will be a friend and helper to your faith, a kindling fire to your mis­sionary thoughts, prayers, and efforts, a window through which you will see 'the real India' as it is not often seen, and a picture, wonderful and beautiful, of the life of the Lord lived in His missionary servants, and in the Indian sisters whom they have brought into His all-­loving power and keeping.The interests of the book are manifold. To those who know the writer's Lotus Buds it will be very moving to see, as it were from within, something of the most pathetic and noble rescue­-work in the world. A hundred details of mis­sionary life will assume a new reality and vividness. And, above all, the MASTER of the field, of the labourers, of the harvest, will be ‘glorified in His saint,' this dear saint with the‘steadfast eyes and the brow of peace,' in whom so wonderfully, in life and in that suffering death, He showed Himself alive for evermore.