By BRUCE HALLETT PRESIDENT

In the last few pages of Andrew Greeley's 1981 best seller, The Cardinal Sins, there is a scene in which a crowd of reporters has gathered in St. Peter's Square in Rome to await the wisp of white smoke that will signal the election of a new Pope. One of those journalists, Greeley writes, is Jordan Bonfante, TIME's Rome bureau chief, who vanishes "to dash off his story" the moment the smoke appears.

The book is fiction, but the reporter and his dedication are real. Bonfante, who is now TIME's Los Angeles bureau chief, was one of the key contributors to the story in this issue on the state of the U.S. Roman Catholic Church on the eve of Pope John Paul II's visit to America. The other was Richard Ostling, a senior correspondent and a frequent commentator on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and CBS Radio.

Bonfante's travels--besides Rome, he has covered Greece, Turkey and the Middle East and has served as Time's Paris bureau chief--give him a global perspective on the Pontiff's role. "We in the U.S. are so intent on 'political' questions we sometimes forget that the Pope has a worldwide church to worry about," he says. For this week's piece, Bonfante brought the international perspective home by traveling to predominantly Mexican-American East Los Angeles to visit the Iglesia de la Resurreccion (Church of the Resurrection), where Mass is accompanied by an eight-piece mariachi band, complete with trumpets and guitars.

In his 26 years of covering the religion beat for TIME, Ostling has written or reported on 36 cover stories on religious themes. He has won all six major prizes for religion reporting, including the prestigious Templeton Award. Like Bonfante, he found fresh reasons for optimism about the state of American Catholicism. "I continue to be amazed at the resiliency of this, the largest spiritual community in the world," says Ostling. "What other institution could have survived such turbulence over a generation and survived with loyalties largely intact? Our polling shows the usual wide disagreement with church teachings on hot-button issues, but the news here is the unshakable lay devotion at parish level." Ostling saw that devotion close up, interviewing would-be priests in Missouri and parishioners in Maryland, and even chatting with Father Greeley in Michigan. Might he pop up in a future Greeley novel? "No, it will not happen," says Ostling modestly, with a laugh. "At least I hope it doesn't."