Razing the Bastions: On the Church in This Age

A short programmatic book (83 pages) published by Johannes Verlag in 1952 in the series Christ heute, reprinted several times and reissued in 1989 with an afterword by Christoph Schönborn; Ignatius Press published the English translation in 1993. It calls on the Church to come out from behind its defensive walls and recover the truly catholic, world-wide scope of its mission. In 1965 Balthasar called it the final and already impatient trumpet blast for a Church no longer barricaded against the world, and added that openness was only half the task: the other half was a deepening of the specifically Christian, since whoever wants more action needs better contemplation. The 1989 edition carries an afterword by Christoph Schönborn.