THIS is Elizabeth Taylor," said Richard Cardinal Cushing, pointing at the TIME reporter. "She's a rich woman from the United States."

This is one of several favorite jokes the cardinal used at public functions last week to introduce our Boston bureau chief, Ruth Mehrtens, who was traveling with him and his party in Latin America. Her task was to continue her reporting for our cover story on the cardinal and the new trends in American Catholicism. To Religion Writer John Elson, an enthusiastic specialist in that subject, the story was a logical continuation of his past covers on Popes John and Paul, and of his many articles on the Vatican Council.

At the outset, Senior Editor William Forbis instructed Reporter Mehrtens to capture all she could of the cardinal's rich personality. Breaking his frequent practice of dealing with the press by telephone, Cushing patiently sat for Cover Artist Robert Vickrey and agreed to a series of interviews with Correspondent Mehrtens, a long-standing fan. "A few days after I moved to Boston in 1958," she recalls, "I turned on the radio at breakfast. His rendition of the rosary made me an immediate convert to Cushing and vastly increased my Protestant affection for the Roman Catholic Church."

During the interviews, the cardinal offered to autograph a copy of his biography for her. Instead she brought him her family Bible, which her Lutheran-minister father had autographed and given her when she was five. On the facing page, the cardinal wrote: "Ruth, love, blessings and prayerful mementos . . ." Wryly, he told her after signing: "I don't know if I should give you my love; it's pretty well worn out."

New Haven-born Correspondent Mehrtens (Smith, '42), who started with TIME as a researcher in 1946, is a veteran of many political safaris. "Traveling with the cardinal," she reports wearily, "is no different from campaigning for a New Hampshire primary with Jack Kennedy, except that we go into more churches."

Although the cardinal was at first reluctant to have a reporter along, he touched her by his unfailing concern for her comfort and by the fact that he kept referring to her as "My dear." The glow was slightly cooled when he explained at one point: "Whenever I am having trouble with a woman, I call her 'my dear.'" At another time when a photographer was taking her picture and she started to pull her hair into shape, His Eminence rumbled, "Don't try to fix yourself up. You couldn't look worse."

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