As a Methodist student preparing for the ministry at Duke University's divinity school some years ago, Wilton Wynn never dreamed that he would become a regular visitor to Vatican City. But he abandoned his theological career, became a journalist and for the past eleven years has been a TIME correspondent in Rome. Thus, as he has been so many times in the past, Wynn was recently at the Vatican, this time to interview Jesuit Leader Father Pedro Arrupe for this week's cover story on the Jesuits, Catholicism's most visible and versatile order of priests.

Wynn and Father Arrupe first met at Arrupe's office in the Jesuit Curia building, where the Jesuit superior general interrupts interviews to answer his own phone and otherwise shows little patience with pomp and ceremony. Just outside the office, Wynn noticed a small green cushion. That, Arrupe told him, was where he sits to pray in Zen Buddhist style, a habit he picked up while serving for 27 years as a missionary in Japan. "When we send a man to China, he becomes a Chinaman," explained Arrupe. "When we send him to India, he becomes an Indian."

That was what a score of other TIME correspondents also discovered as they sought out members of Arrupe's 31,000-man Jesuit army at locations from Hong Kong to California. In India, New Delhi Correspondent James Shepherd interviewed one Jesuit while they both sat in the yoga lotus position on prayer mats. Others were clad in Indian robes, sandals, and sported swami beards. In Berkeley, TIME'S Lois Armstrong found that the priests could also adapt easily to the Californian way of life. For their weekly cocktail party at the Jesuit School of Theology, they donned sports shirts and slacks. Brought up in a Lutheran parsonage, she was delighted to find the Jesuits "open, talkative, thoughtful, critical, probing, interesting to a man -and not at all secretive."

Correspondent Burton Pines visited Jesuit universities throughout the Midwest. There, young priests in turtlenecks and Levi's discussed their concern with the order's role in the secular community, while older priests, sitting in book-cluttered offices, worried over the relaxation of Jesuit discipline. "Most were delightfully irreverent toward the papacy and church hierarchy," reports Pines. "Their intellectual self-confidence, plus their legendary commitment to logical, rational thought, made every conversation with the Jesuits a heady trip, leaving me with a genuine high."

The cover story was written by Religion Editor Mayo Mohs and edited by Associate Editor Lance Morrow. A graduate of Xavier University in Cincinnati before joining TIME in 1966, Mohs taught at Loyola High School in Los Angeles. Both are Jesuit institutions.

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