was introduced by a friend to Father Hans Urs von Balthasar, a Jesuit priest then serving as a university chaplain in Basel. She told him of her interest in entering the Catholic Church, and he began to give her catechetical instruction. Von Balthasar says of this process, “In the instructions she understood everything immediately, as though she had only—and for how long!—waited to hear exactly what I was saying in order to affirm it.” Von Speyr praised the Jesuit for having “removed all the obstacles for me” in prayer. She was received into the Catholic Church on All Saints’ Day, November 1, 1940. After the liturgy, von Speyr apologized for having accidentally omitted the words “extra quam nulla salus” during the profession of faith; when von Balthasar and her husband both replied that they had heard the phrase, she remarked, “Then maybe an angel said it for me”. Still, some scholars have criticized her for leaving out this portion of the profession. She was confirmed shortly after her reception into the Church, with the critic and translator Albert Béguin as her sponsor. Since von Speyr had many Protestant friends in Basel, her conversion to Catholicism caused some controversy. Her own mother and siblings took a distance from her after her confirmation, though they would reconcile years later. Von Speyr's husband, Werner, supported her embrace of Catholicism, but he himself did not convert. Her sons Niklaus and Arnold, with their children, were eventually received into the Church, along with other family members. By von Balthasar's account, von Speyr went on to befriend many notable Catholic thinkers in Europe, including Romano Guardini, Hugo Rahner, Erich Przywara, Henri de Lubac, Reinhold Schneider, Annette Kolb, and Gabriel Marcel. Collaboration with Hans Urs von Balthasar In the months following her conversion to Catholicism, von Speyr reported having extraordinary experiences in prayer. Von Balthasar became convinced of the authenticity of von Speyr's mysticism, and the two recognized that they had a shared theological mission. Between 1944 and 1960, von Speyr dictated to von Balthasar some sixty books of spiritual and Scriptural commentary, including John, Mark, The Letter to the Ephesians, Elijah, and Three Women and the Lord. Given von Speyr's commitments as a mother and a doctor, von Balthasar alone worked to arrange, edit, and publish the texts with ecclesiastical approval through the German-language press Johannes Verlag Einsiedeln. One of her first books to appear was