JUDY VALENTE: A priest meets with business executives. The topic: applying spiritual principles to the workplace. Inner-city high school students get a shot at private education, college, and a career. A man makes a month-long prayer retreat using spiritual exercises from the 16th century. A Marxist government with priests in its cabinet. And in El Salvador six priests, believed to be subversives, are murdered. Social justice, education, a distinctive spirituality and a history of persecution: These are the marks of a religious order that calls its members contemplatives in action. It is the Society of Jesus -- the Jesuits. Not a monastic order, the Jesuits have often been accused of being too worldly.
FATHER WILLIAM J. BYRON, SJ: We're men of faith, but we're also men of the world. But we're in the world doing worldly things to the extent that that's what God wants.VALENTE: Father William Byron epitomizes the Jesuit spirit. An economist, author, former university president and World War II veteran, he recently became, in his 50th year as a Jesuit, a pastor in Washington, D.C.
CHESTER GILLIS (Professor of Theology, Georgetown University): The Jesuits are very willing to stand up for what they believe in and have over the centuries, to the point that Pope Clement XIV suppressed them in 1773 for many years.VALENTE: The Jesuit tradition had an unlikely beginning. Their founder in sixteenth-century Spain was a soldier, Ignatius Loyola -- an aristocrat, a notorious womanizer, gambler, and possibly a murderer. Recuperating from a severe leg wound, Ignatius underwent a profound religious conversion, offering his sword to the Virgin Mary and vowing to become a "soldier for Christ." The legacy of St. Ignatius includes his Spiritual Exercises, a strenuous examination of scripture and self. It lasts 30 days.
FATHER BILL KENNEY, SJ: It's a time of silence. No radio, no TV, no car. You really are by yourself.
VALENTE: Here at a retreat house in Maryland, a retired diocesan priest, Father Bill Kenney, is nearing the end of those exercises. They are fundamental to Jesuit spirituality. Every Jesuit makes one after entering the order, and again after ordination. It is the search for a personal relationship with God.
FATHER KENNEY: Week one would be to reflect on one's own need for forgiveness. Week number two, the focus would be on the public life of Christ. Week number three would focus on the passion, suffering, and death of Christ. Week number four is a focus on resurrection. It's been a time for me to get more deeply in touch with who I am. It's helped me to become aware of God's overwhelming love for me.VALENTE: Joe Sandman, a husband and father of three, doesn't have time for a 30-day retreat. But Ignatius had devised ways to do the exercises without disrupting everyday life.
Father William Creed praying with Joe Sandman: Bless us as Joe and I gather here. Lead us and guide us. Let your Spirit lead us.VALENTE: Sandman meets regularly with a Jesuit spiritual director. Through meetings like this, some lay people spread the Spiritual Exercises over a period of several months.
FATHER MICHAEL SPAROUGH, SJ: Ignatian spirituality is about finding God in all things -- finding God in your business life, finding God in your social life, in your family life.
VALENTE: Using props like these beanbags, Father Michael Sparough and other young Jesuits talk to Generation X-ers in Chicago at what Sparough calls spiritual Tupperware parties.
FATHER SPAROUGH: It's our belief, based on the experience of St. Ignatius, when people start looking deeply at their life, at the meaning of their life, where it's going, sooner or later they'll start asking the God question.
VALENTE: Unique to the Jesuits is the rigorous training they undergo. Even a man entering with a Ph.D. faces 11 years of training. Glen Chun reflects both that tradition and the changes that have occurred. He has a master's degree in business and worked as an accountant for a global corporation. A convert to Catholicism, he entered the order two years ago when he was 41. By the time he's ordained, he'll be over 50.
GLEN CHUN, SJ: When I looked at the range of apostolic work that they do, there are so many things in there that I could see myself doing. And what was very important to me was to see the biographies of the people who are already in the Society and imagine if I fit in with that kind of a group.GILLIS: They've had a very profound influence on the Church in education circles, spirituality circles, and more recently in social justice and political circles as well.
VALENTE: From the early days of the order, the Jesuits opened schools and sent missionaries around the world, many of whom would end up being murdered by the people they had come to proselytize. As educators of the elite, Ignatius's men had power and prestige.
VALENTE: Many of the nation's Jesuit high schools educate the well-to-do. Not this one: It is Cristo Rey High School in an immigrant Latino neighborhood in Chicago rife with gang violence. These students are getting on a bus, but it's not taking them to classes. 
FATHER JOHN FOLEY, SJ (Cristo Rey High School President): You can see the students' pride grow, and they feel so much better about themselves and their own future. Suddenly, life has possibilities, and therefore they study better.
