COVERING the Vatican," says Rome Correspondent Wilton Wynn, "is a challenge. Almost never is it possible to go to an official source, to ask a straight question and get a straight answer. You have to find sources you can trust, and then you have to convince the sources that they can trust you."

Wynn and his Rome colleague John Shaw have been so successful in building that mutual trust that TIME was able to report the contents of Pope Paul's encyclical, Humanae Vitae, last July in advance of its official publication. For this week's cover story on the storm of Catholic dissent stirred up by that encyclical, Shaw and Wynn found their sources still available--and even more cautious. Rarely was either man able to conduct an interview across a desk in a Vatican office. Shaw found himself taking soggy notes as he conversed with a theologian in swimming trunks beside a pool on the Via Cassia. One Vatican official refused to see Wynn anywhere but in the privacy of his own apartment, where he talked freely over glasses of his prize cognac. There was, in fact, only one interview in a Vatican office.

There, a conservative theologian remarked at the end: "You may be interested to know that we are sitting in the very room where Galileo stayed when he was summoned to Rome to appear before the Inquisition."

From the rest of Europe, from South America and the U.S., other TIME correspondents reported the same combination of caution and anxiety to be heard. Their reports reflected an uncommon amount of argument and uncertainty about a difficult subject, but the staff that handled those files in New York had some special qualifications. Researcher Clare Mead got her master's in history at Notre Dame, taught high school in Texas as a Dominican nun.

After leaving the convent two years ago, she came to New York and to TIME. Reporter Dennis Sullivan is a former seminarian who studied in Rome at the Gregorian University. He taught theology at St. John's University in New York before turning to journalism. Associate Editor Bruce Henderson, who wrote the cover story, is no stranger to religious dissent; he has been reporting on the current controversy since it started, and he wrote the Martin Luther cover for the Easter issue of 1967. Senior Editor John Elson, a seven-year veteran of the Religion section--both as writer and editor--has eleven Religion covers to his credit, including the two previous covers on Pope Paul and the now famous "Is God Dead?" cover that ran April 8, 1966.

As he studied the files that passed over his desk last week, Elson was particularly amused to find Stringer Dick Rawe in Cincinnati reporting that he had seen a car carrying the neatly lettered sign: "My God Isn't Dead. Sorry About Yours."

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