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Outside Janssens' room are eight letter boxes, each containing the mail from the order's eight "assistancies." These letters, sometimes as many as 20,000 a day, are summarized paragraph by paragraph by secretaries, and annotated by the Assistant of the area involved before a final reply goes out. At 12:45, like every Jesuit throughout the world, Father Janssens does his 15-minute examination of conscience. After lunch, during which he sometimes waits on table for fellow Jesuits, he gets back to his desk. The day ends with a 10:15 visit to the chapel and a 10:30 lights-out. This schedule is relaxed slightly on weekends, when the general packs the omnipresent letters, plus a private secretary, into a diesel-engined black Mercedes, and heads for the Jesuit-owned Villa Cavallatti in the Alban Hills, where he tends a flower garden described by him as "a great love."
The eleven years of Janssens' generalship have been marked less by spectacular achievements than by a policy of steady, quiet realism, well illustrated by Janssens' decision to close many of the order's colleges that for centuries trained young aristocrats, instead open colleges in Italy's Red districts. Balancing up the eleven years of Father Janssens' generalship, the delegates may well conclude that the order has gained not only in numbers but in public esteem and within the church itself. Intramural friction with other Catholic orders is at a minimum. The society enjoys the personal favor of Pius XII (both the Pope's secretaries are Jesuits, as is his personal confessor). In an age of ideological conflict, many intellectuals (including non-Catholics) have come to appreciate the discipline and diligence Jesuits have brought to the battle of ideas. Much of the distrust aroused in the past by the order that was instructed by its founder to be "all things to all men" has disappeared. There are few who would today second the sputtering judgment of John Adams: "If ever there was a body of men who merited eternal damnation on earth and in hell, it is this Society of Loyola's."
* For the U.S., Britain, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Eastern Europe, Latin America.