Adrienne von Speyr (20 September 1902 – 17 September 1967) was a Swiss Catholic convert, physician, mystic, and author of some sixty books of spirituality and theology. Biography Early life Adrienne von Speyr was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, to an upper-middle-class Protestant family. Her father, Theodor von Speyr, was an ophthalmologist. Her mother, Laure Girard, was the descendant of a family of noted watchmakers and jewelers from Geneva and Neuchâtel. Adrienne was her parents' second child. Her sister, Hélène, was a year and a half older. Her first brother, Willy, who became a physician, was born in 1905 and died in 1978. Her second brother, Theodor, was born in 1913 and served as the director of the Swiss Bank Corporation in London for many years. By Hans Urs von Balthasar's account, von Speyr was the "unloved child" in her family, despite her cheerfulness. Her mother scolded her daily, often without reason, which led Adrienne to turn to prayer and to develop an appreciation for sacrifice and renunciation. She was close to her father, who understood and respected her, sometimes taking her with him to the hospital to visit sick children. This sparked her desire to become a physician, which would eventually guide her toward a career as a family doctor. In her primary school years, she began knitting for the poor, forming a society with her friends for this purpose. From early on, she had a deep relationship with her grandmother, a prayerful Calvinist. Von Speyr was a precocious student... As a child, she even occasionally substituted for a teacher who suffered from asthma. In her religion classes, however, she began to sense an emptiness in the form of Protestantism being offered. Although she had no exposure to the Roman Catholic Church, she had some early intuitions about Catholic practice. At the age of nine, she gave a talk to her classmates about the Jesuits, after an angel had told her "that the Jesuits were people who loved Jesus totally, and that the truth of God was greater than that of men, and as a result one could not always tell people everything exactly as one understands it in God". After her conversion to Catholicism in 1940, at thirty-eight years old, she recounted to her confessor Hans Urs von Balthasar that as a young child she encountered in a stairwell a man she only now recognized to be Saint