Von Speyr was a precocious student. As a child, she even occasionally substituted for a teacher who suffered from asthma. In her religion classes, however, she began to sense an emptiness in the form of Protestantism being offered. Although she had no exposure to the Roman Catholic Church, she had some early intuitions about Catholic practice. At the age of nine, she gave a talk to her classmates about the Jesuits, after an angel had told her "that the Jesuits were people who loved Jesus totally, and that the truth of God was greater than that of men, and as a result one could not always tell people everything exactly as one understands it in God". 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. During her teenage years, she once reproached a religion teacher for his "prejudice" against Catholicism.