I don't think there is the slightest doubt the good Card will have the Liturgy on the front burner. As I read more on this thread, I think confusion aboiut the Cardinal's teachings might be due to the fact this is not a self-contained piece. I wish the blogger had posted a link, to say nothing about identifying where the snippet came from.
This may be partly due to the fact that this is a translation, and the translators may have put it into that kind of terminology and flavor. It may also be that Ratzinger is a German, and influenced in his language because of cutting his teeth on the writings of German theologians -- Catholic and Protestant.
We in the Orthodox Church have this from time to time. Fr. Alexander Schmemann, for instance, is the most famous (or infamous -- depending on one's perspective) theologian in the American Russian diaspora. I am told that he was actually, in practice, quite conservative and reverent liturgically. Yet, reading his "Introduction to Liturgical Theology" or "For the Life of the World" is sheer torture for anyone steeped in Orthodox thought. This is because Schmemann, even though he was in many ways a Russian's Russian, in other ways, he was heavily influenced by the folks at Union Theological, et al, and wrote in ways that seems designed to bring respectability in their eyes, by using their same convoluted and mushy language ("emmantizing the eschaton" and all that sort of thing.)
I had to look up something in the "Introduction to Liturgical Theology" because of a discussion I was having with my priest (who knew and liked Schmemann), and I think I would rather have had a root canal. I have to confess that while I'd probably enjoy sitting down with Cardinal Ratzinger and chatting over a whiskey or a beer, I wouldn't be able to make it through 100 pages of his kind of writing, if this is representative.
This may all seem rather petty, but for us Orthodox, it is not only important what we say and how we believe, but also how we say it. We have many examples just in the 20th century of highly educated bishops and theologians in the Orthodox Church who nonetheless rigorously used the Church's relatively simple and straightforward patristic language in communicating what the Church teaches (St. Justin Popovich and St. Nicholai of Zhicha of the Serbian Church, the late Fr. John Romanides and the still living Metr. Hierotheos Vlachos of Greece spring to mind).
I recently read something written by Abp. Christodoulos of Greece (their current primate), and was struck by the fact that this was a highly educated man (and it comes through), and yet the flavor of his writing and speaking was utterly patristic and didn't smack of a paper presented at a "theological symposium" -- even though that was exactly where it was presented!
I agree, by the way, that from what I have read of Ratzinger, he is pretty traditional by Catholic standards, and thus I would expect that there is more to his thought on this matter than what we see here.