Two years ago over 2000 delegates from all the dioceses and Catholic national organisations, including 42 bishops, 255 clergy and 150 religious men and women and 36 ecumenical observers attended the National Pastoral Congress in Liverpool. For those of us who were there it was a remarkable experience of an open, sharing, participating, listening, celebrating Church, a veritable conversion experience. Back in our local patches it is difficult to retain the sense of exhilaration and commitment with which we left Liverpool two years ago. Was it, then, all a load of froth, an irrelevant, euphoric interlude to cheer us up? Was it, as I asked before the Congress ‘a damp squib or pentecostal fire’? (New Life, Winter 1980). Did it represent a new Spring or was it a false dawn? The official report of the Congress provides us with the opportunity to recall the expectations aroused by the Congress and reflect on some of its outcomes. In this article I propose to attempt three tasks: firstly, to review Liverpool 1980; secondly, to consider the place of the National Pastoral Congress in the long process of renewal in the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales since the Second Vatican Council; and thirdly, to reflect on the contemporary situation in the light of the Congress, the message from the bishops to the local Church in the light of the Congress (The Easter People), and developments which have been stimulated by it since.