However he is best known for his work on Hans Urs von Balthasar, publishing three analytic volumes on von Balthasar's famous trilogy: The Word Has Been Abroad: A Guide Through Balthasar's Aesthetics (1998), No Bloodless Myth: A Guide Through Balthasar’s Dramatics (2000) and Say It Is Pentecost: A Guide Through Balthasar’s Logic (2001).
In Balthasar's book Mysterium Paschale he explored the meaning of Holy Saturday, where Jesus Christ dies and descends to the dead, to be resurrected by God the Father and His own power.
He was ordained a priest in 1972, and continued his studies in Fribourg, Tübingen and Lucerne, where he earned a doctorate with a dissertation on the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Hans Christian Andersen | Otto von Bismarck | Alexander von Humboldt | Hans Holbein the Younger | Hans Zimmer | Wernher von Braun | Carl Maria von Weber | Herbert von Karajan | Hans Werner Henze | Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher | John von Neumann | Lars von Trier | Ferdinand von Mueller | Paul von Hindenburg | Alexander von Humboldt Foundation | Heinrich von Kleist | Anne Sofie von Otter | Hans Memling | Hans Pfitzner | Erich von Stroheim | Max von Sydow | Justus von Liebig | Hans Küng | Hermann von Helmholtz | Hans Conried | Franz von Papen | Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg | Carl von Clausewitz | Hans Knappertsbusch |
Communio is a federation of theological journals, founded in 1972 by Joseph Ratzinger, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, Walter Kasper, Marc Ouellet, Louis Bouyer and others.
Of importance are his German translations (Hölderlin, Rilke, Goethe, Novalis, Brecht, Christian Morgenstern, Hans Urs von Balthasar) and English (theater: complete Shakespeare prose, likewise those of Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Saul Bellow, Thomas Merton, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, or Joyce's Ulysses (novel), for which he received the Translation Prize Fray Luis de León, 1977).