[1] Her mother scolded her daily, often without reason, which led Adrienne to turn to prayer and to develop an appreciation for sacrifice and renunciation.

[5] 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 Ignatius of Loyola.

[6] At her mother's insistence, she also spent a year at a girls' school in La Chaux-de-Fonds, since the gymnasium was thought to give her too much exposure to boys.

[7] After a year, von Speyr's father allowed her to return to the gymnasium, where her classmates greeted her with wild applause when she entered.

[11] She came to understand her physical suffering as a way of sharing in the pain of others,[12] and she spent much time with the patients at her uncle's psychiatric hospital near Bern, where she discovered a gift for consoling the sick.

At the sanatorium, von Speyr learned Russian, read Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and was invited to give lectures to fellow patients.

One of these talks reportedly prompted her friend Louisa Jacques (later the Poor Clare Sister Mary of the Holy Trinity) to remark, "You're going to make me become a Catholic".

After recovering from a second bout of tuberculosis, von Speyr studied nursing for several months at Hôpital Saint-Loup near Pompaples, but left dissatisfied.

Although her mother tried to arrange a job and a husband for her, Adrienne resolved instead to enter medical school at the University of Basel, which created a rift between them.

[18] She was a pupil of Gerhard Hotz and became a friend of fellow medical students Adolf Portmann, a zoologist, and Franz Merke, a surgeon.

[20] In a short biography of von Speyr, von Balthasar lists some of the decisive features of her time in medical school:[C]omplete contentment when she could finally work with the sick, when she could make silent rounds at night in the wards in order to comfort, to help, to prepare the dying for death; her indignation when patients used in demonstrations in the lecture halls or unwed mothers in the delivery room were not treated with respect for their human dignity; her anger when a doctor, responsible for the death of a patient, put the blame on one of the nurses (Adrienne saw to it that his lectures were boycotted by the entire student body until the doctor had to give up his professorship in Basel); her admiration at the silent asceticism of a large number of the nurses.

[23] Since her clientele was mostly poor, she treated many of them free of charge; according to von Balthasar, she “saw as many as sixty to eighty patients a day”.

[24][23] After moving her office to her home for a time during the early 1950s,[25] von Speyr ceased to practice medicine due to illness in 1954.

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.

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.

The untimely death of her husband led Adrienne into an interior crisis, provoking her to contemplate suicide until her friend Franz Merke intervened.

In 1936, Emil Dürr's friend and colleague Werner Kaegi — who knew the boys and wanted to help raising them – proposed a marriage, and she accepted.

[29] 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.

[35] In 1940, after recovering from a heart attack, she was introduced by a friend to Father Hans Urs von Balthasar, a Jesuit priest then serving as a university chaplain in Basel.

[46] After a long discernment, von Balthasar would eventually leave the Society of Jesus to found this community, since his superiors did not believe it would be compatible with Jesuit life.

According to von Balthasar, “no physician could understand how she could still be alive.”[51] During this period, she prayed, knitted, visited with her grandchildren, wrote letters, read novels, and continued guiding the women in the Johannesgemeinschaft.

[54] She is considered by many to have been a mystic and is reputed to have had supernatural experiences of, for example, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Holy Trinity, a number of saints (including John the Evangelist and Ignatius of Loyola), Christ's Passion, and Hell, as well as incidents of bilocation and stigmata.

[63] In another posthumous text, Kreuz und Hölle, von Speyr relates her experiences of the Passion and of the descent into Hell, giving illustrations of the metaphysical nature of damnation as isolation and "total depersonalization" in Professor Matthew Sutton's phrase.

Her insight into the inmost communion of faith and love uniting the Mother of Jesus and the one disciple who persevered with her under the Cross was no less profound; it was here that she glimpsed the virginal origin of the Church that would be entrusted to Peter’s care.

May this spirituality, which Adrienne embodied with such exemplary vigor, help you to incarnate ever better your own commitment to live in accord with Church and Gospel in the midst of the realities of the contemporary world.

I am convinced that when her works are made available, those who are in a position to judge will concur with me about their value and will thank God that he has granted such graces to the Church in our time.”[75] The spirituality of Adrienne von Speyr is a pillar of the formation program at the Casa Balthasar, a house of discernment in Rome founded under the auspices of Joseph Ratzinger, and at Heart's Home, an international Catholic missionary organization.

In 2018, French filmmaker Marie Viloin — director of documentaries about Bernadette Soubirous and Faustina Kowalska — produced the half-hour feature Adrienne von Speyr (1902–1967): Sur la terre comme au ciel as a segment of the program Le Jour du Seigneur, broadcast by the national French TV network France 2.