his father passed away, followed not long after by his godmother. In May 1946, Robert Rast, a Jesuit novice who had been his friend and collaborator in the Schulungsgemeinschaft, died of tuberculosis. That same year, his Jesuit superiors informed him that the Society of Jesus could not be answerable for the Community of Saint John, the secular institute he had begun to organize with Adrienne von Speyr. Feeling that he "was being called by God to certain definite tasks in the Church", he made a 30-day retreat at the request of Father General Jean-Baptiste Janssens, where the director confirmed that von Balthasar, while remaining a priest, should leave the Jesuit order to work with the Community of Saint John. Von Balthasar considered this a "very grave" step, but in 1950, he officially left the Society of Jesus. He renewed his religious vows a few months later. Shortly before his exit from the society, the University of Munich offered him a professorship, as a successor to Romano Guardini, but he declined. He remained without a ministerial role in the church until, in 1956, he was incardinated into the Diocese of Chur as a diocesan priest. Lectures, writing, and publishing (1950–1967) Von Balthasar's exit from the Jesuits left him "literally on the street", as biographer Peter Henrici notes, and he took up lecture tours across Germany, which helped him provide for himself and fund the Johannes Verlag publishing house. He also continued giving retreats to young people. Between 1950 and 1956, he authored a number of books and articles, including Therese von Lisieux (Thérèse of Lisieux) (1950), Schleifung der Bastionen (Razing the Bastions) (1952), Das betrachtende Gebet (Prayer) (1955), and Die Gottesfrage des heutigen Menschen (The God Question and Modern Man) (1956), as well as monograph studies of Georges Bernanos, Karl Barth, and Reinhold Schneider. Much of his work during this period—written after the release of Pope Pius XII's apostolic constitution Provida Mater Ecclesia, which gave an ecclesiastical blessing to secular institutes—confronts the question of how Christian discipleship might be lived from within the world. After he was welcomed into the Diocese of Chur, he settled in the city of Basel, hosted by his married friends Werner Kaegi and Adrienne von Speyr, in whose home he remained until 1967. During this period—although he was diagnosed with leukemia in 1958—von Balthasar wrote prolifically, most notably the seven-volume work Herrlichkeit (The Glory of the