them free of charge; according to von Balthasar, she “saw as many as sixty to eighty patients a day”. After moving her office to her home for a time during the early 1950s, von Speyr ceased to practice medicine due to illness in 1954. Marriage and family life In 1927, during a trip to San Bernardino, Switzerland, some friends of von Speyr introduced her to the University of Basel historian Emil Dürr, a widower with two young sons. Dürr and von Speyr married, living on the Münsterplatz near the historic Basel Minster church. Von Speyr, who took the name of Dürr, became an adoptive mother to the two boys, Niklaus and Arnold, and played an active role with her husband in upper-class Basel society. She had three miscarriages and bore no children of her own. The couple “seriously considered becoming Catholic”, but Emil died suddenly in a tram accident in 1934, after seven years of marriage. The untimely death of her husband led Adrienne into an interior crisis, provoking her to contemplate suicide until her friend Franz Merke intervened. The widowed von Speyr continued to raise Niklaus and Arnold on her own and to practice medicine. In 1936, Emil Dürr's friend and colleague Werner Kaegi—who knew the boys and wanted to help bring them up—proposed marriage, and she accepted. Kaegi, a lifelong member of the Swiss Reformed Church, encouraged von Speyr to explore Catholicism, and she converted in 1940. Von Speyr's daughter-in-law Lore Dürr-Freckmann recalls that the couple provided financially for single mothers and opened their home to disadvantaged women and children. Between 1952 and 1967, the Kaegi family also offered a room in their house to Father Hans Urs von Balthasar. Niklaus and Arnold both married and had a number of children, who considered von Speyr their grandmother. Von Speyr remained close to her sons, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren until her death in 1967. In interviews, her family has described her as joyful, warm, and generous. Conversion Von Speyr began to attend Mass periodically after her husband Emil Dürr’s death in 1934. In the years following his fatal accident, she found it difficult to pray, especially the line “Thy will be done” in the Our Father. After her marriage to Werner Kaegi in 1936, von Speyr made several unsuccessful attempts to contact Catholic priests to receive instruction in the Catholic faith. In 1940, after recovering from a heart attack, she