pshih-VA-ra) was born in 1889 to a Polish father and a German mother in the upper Silesian (Prussian) town of Kattowitz, today Katowice in Poland.

Due to anti-Jesuit laws still in effect in Germany, in 1908 he entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus in Exaten, Netherlands, concluding his philosophical and theological studies at nearby Ignatius College in Valkenburg.

"[4] For example, in 1933 on the eve of the seizure of power, he argued in a significant public lecture in Berlin that Christianity and Nazism, with their competing understandings of "Reich," are ultimately incompatible.

In 1938 Przywara published Deus Semper Maior, a massive three-volume commentary on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola which is well known in the Jesuits.

In 1945, his fellow Jesuit and colleague at Stimmen der Zeit Alfred Delp was executed for treason, as was his friend Karl Barth's student Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

In the words of Thomas O’Meara, "The priest who had appeared to possess energy without limits became anxious, incapable of work, and erratic, a condition only heightened by the opinions of others that it was partly psycho-somatic, exaggerated, or easily remedied.

"[9] Though ousted from his familiar position and unable to write and publish, he continued to be active, as he was commissioned by Cardinal Faulhaber with the pastoral care of elderly academics in Munich.

He also gave regular lectures in the old Bürgersaalkirche and conducted small seminars in private residences on such topics as Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Rilke.

His health, though, continued to decline, leading to multiple interventions by his erstwhile student and lifelong friend Hans Urs von Balthasar, who in 1947 brought him to Switzerland for the purposes of convalescence.

Przywara returned to Munich and in 1950 retired from community religious life to live in the country in a little village called Hagen, near Murnau.

On the philosophical front, he was one of the first Catholic thinkers to engage modern phenomenology, in particular the philosophies of Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, and Martin Heidegger.

Equally, Alter und Neuer Bund (1956), whose initial form was a series of talks given in Berlin, Vienna, and Munich during World War II, explores the relationship between the Old and New Testament.

While Przywara's reception in modern Catholic theology was generally positive, and his importance to Hans Urs von Balthasar enduring, his doctrine of the analogy of being was fiercely challenged by Karl Barth, who saw in it a kind of natural theology and therefore rejected it, calling it the "invention of Antichrist" and the "chief reason for not becoming Catholic.