For many, perhaps most, Catholics, the most frequent place of encounter with the Bible is in the Liturgy of the Word at Mass. Prior to the Second Vatican Council, that encounter was severely restricted. The Scripture readings at Mass were on a one-year cycle and most of the Bible, including most of the New Testament, was never proclaimed.

For more than 1,000 years, liturgical reform had meant an effort to establish uniformity in worship throughout the Catholic Church. At the Second Vatican Council, reform took a different direction – the quest for uniformity gave way to an allowance for the liturgy to respect the diversity of cultures around the world.

One key statement of Sacrosanctum Concilium (The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy) is that the liturgy is "the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; it is also the fount from which all her power flows" (n. 10).

The Second Vatican Council was followed quickly by an explosion of lay liturgical ministries. Prior to the council, the sanctuary of every church had been clearly demarcated from the main body of the church by the presence of a Communion rail.

As the years go by, it gets increasingly difficult to detect without research some of the shifts in thinking that occur in the documents of the Second Vatican Council. They have been part of us for so long and, indeed, a majority of today's Catholics have no recollection of the Church prior to the council.

Religion is based on sacrifice. The problem that religion faces is that even the greatest sacrifice offered by a finite person cannot hope to bring one into the presence of the infinite God.

The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy was the first document approved at the Second Vatican Council. Unlike the council's other major documents, it sailed through the approval process fairly readily, although a tiny but vocal minority at first raised strenuous objections.

Patriarch Maximos Saigh, head of the Melkite rite in Antioch, made his introduction to the Second Vatican Council by breaking a rule. Instead of speaking Latin as the rules required, the patriarch spoke unapologetically in French.

All of the preliminaries were now over and the Second Vatican Council got down to business. But what business would that be? Of the 70 schema (proposed documents), the council fathers had seen only seven. Of those seven, by far the most important were those on divine revelation and on the liturgy.

It didn't take long for the tide to turn at the Second Vatican Council. Curia officials had spent much of the 44 months between the day Pope John XXIII announced the council until it actually began planning for how they believed it should be carried out.