Originally published in 1952 with the subtitle, On the Church in This Age, the present volume contains a plea to the Church to recover the truly catholic scope of its mission. As Balthasar himself wrote years, later “My programmatic little book Schleifung der Bastionen [Razing the Bastions], was the final and already impatient blast of the trumpet calling for a Church no longer barricaded against the world. The blast did not die away unheard, but now it forced the trumpeter himself to reflect more deeply. Indeed, it was not as though we were unaware that with an opening to the world, an aggiornamento, a broadening of the horizons, a translation of the Christian message into an intellectual language understandable by the modern world, only half is done. The other half — of at least equal importance — is a reflection on the specifically Christian element itself, a purification, a deepening, a centering of its idea, which alone renders us capable of representing it, radiating it, translating it believably in the world. . . . The last ten years have shown inexorably that the most dynamic program of openness to the world remains one-sided (and hence becomes exceedingly dangerous) if it does not cultivate with growing awareness its own distinctive counterpoise and balance: whoever desires greater action needs better contemplation; whoever wants to play a more formative role must pray and obey more profoundly; whoever wants to achieve additional goals must grasp the uselessness and futility, the uncalculating and incalculable (hence “unprofitable”) nature of the eternal love in Christ, as well as of every love along the path of Christian discipleship. Every program of mission to the world must at all times contain what Guardini called “the discernment of what is Christian”. . . . For this reason, lest everything in the Church become superficial and insipid, the true, undiminished program for the Church today must read: the greatest possible radiance in the world by virtue of the closest possible following of Christ” (Hans Urs von Balthasar in My Work in Retrospect, 1965).