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VATICAN CITY — With a puff of white smoke from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel and to the cheers of thousands of rain-soaked faithful, a gathering of Catholic cardinals picked a new pope from among their midst on Wednesday — choosing the cardinal from Argentina, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the first leader of the church ever chosen from South America.

The new pope, 76, to be called Francis, the 266th pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, is also the first non-European leader of the church in more than 1,000 years.

“I would like to thank you for your embrace,” said the new pope, dressed in white, speaking from the white balcony on St. Peter’s Basilica as thousands of the faithful cheered joyously below. Francis thanked his fellow cardinals, saying they “have chosen one from far away, but here I am.”

“Habemus papam!,” members of the crowd shouted in Latin, waving umbrellas and flags. “We have a pope!” Others cried “Viva il Papa!”

“It was like waiting for the birth of a baby, only better, " said a Roman man. A child sitting atop his father’s shoulders waved a crucifix.

Francis is the first pope not born in Europe since Columbus alighted in the New World. In choosing him, the cardinals sent a powerful message that the future of the Church lies in the Global South, home to the bulk of the world’s Catholics. One of Benedict’s abiding preoccupations was the rise of secularism in Europe, and he took the name Benedict after the founder of European monastic culture.

The new pope inherits a church wrestling with an array of challenges that intensified during his predecessor, Benedict XVI — from a priest shortage and growing competition from evangelical churches in the Southern Hemisphere where most of the world’s Catholics live, to a sexual abuse crisis that has undermined the church’s moral authority in the West, to difficulties governing the Vatican itself.

Benedict abruptly ended his troubled eight-year papacy last month, announcing he was no longer up to the rigors of the job. He became the first pontiff in 598 years to resign. The 115 cardinals who are under the age of 80 and eligible to vote chose their new leader after two days of voting.

Before beginning the voting by secret ballot in the Sistine Chapel on Tuesday, in a cloistered meeting known as a conclave, the cardinals swore an oath of secrecy in Latin, a rite designed to protect deliberations from outside scrutiny — and to protect cardinals from earthly influence as they seek divine guidance.

The conclave followed more than a week of intense, broader discussions among the world’s cardinals where they discussed the problems facing the church and their criteria for its next leader.

“We spoke among ourselves in an exceptional and free way, with great truth, about the lights, but also about shadows in the current situation of the Catholic Church,” Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna, a theologian known for his intellect and his pastoral touch, told reporters earlier this week.

“The pope’s election is something substantially different from a political election,” Cardinal Schönborn said, adding that the role was not “the chief executive of a multinational company, but the spiritual head of a community of believers.”

Indeed, Benedict was selected in 2005 as a caretaker after the momentous papacy of John Paul II, but the shy theologian appeared to show little inclination toward management. His papacy suffered from crises of communications — with Muslims, Jews and Anglicans — that, along with a sex abuse crisis that raged back to life in Europe in 2010, evolved into a crisis of governance.

Critics of Benedict’s secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, said he had difficulties in running the Vatican and appeared more interested in the Vatican’s ties to Italy than to the rest of the world. The Vatican is deeply concerned about the fate of Christians in the war-torn Middle East.

The new pope will also inherit power struggles over the management of the Vatican bank, which must continue a process of meeting international transparency standards or risk being shut out of the mainstream international banking system. In one of his final acts as pope, Benedict appointed a German aristocrat, Ernst von Freyberg, as the bank’s new president.

He will have to help make the Vatican bureaucracy — often seen as a hornet’s nest of infighting Italians — work more efficiently for the good of the church. After years in which Benedict and John Paul helped consolidate more power at the top, many liberal Catholics also hope that the next pope will also give local bishops’ conferences more decision-making power to help respond to the needs of the faithful.

The reform of the Roman Curia, which runs the Vatican, “is not conceptually hard, it’s hard on a political front but it will take five minutes for someone who has the strength. You get rid of the spoil system and that’s it,” said Alberto Melloni, the author of numerous books on the Vatican and the Second Vatican Council. The hard things are “if you want a permanent consultation of bishops’ conferences,” he added.

For Mr. Melloni, foreign policy and the church’s vision of Asia would be crucial to the next pope. “If Roman Catholicism was capable of learning Greek while it was speaking Aramaic, of learning Celtic while it was speaking Latin, now it either has to learn Chinese or ‘ciao,'” he said, using the Italian world for “goodbye.”

Ahead of the election of a new pope, cardinals said they were looking for “a pope that understands the problems of the Church at present” and who is strong enough to tackle them, said Cardinal Miloslav Vlk, the archbishop emeritus of Prague who participated in the general congregations but was not eligible to vote in a conclave.

He said those problems included reforming the Roman Curia, handling the pedophilia crisis and cleaning up the Vatican bank, which has been working to meet international transparency standards.

“He needs to be capable of solving these issues,” Cardinal Vlk said as he walked near the Vatican this week, adding that the next pope needs “to be open to the world, to the troubles of the world, to society, because evangelization is a primary task, to bring the Gospel to people.”

The sex abuse crisis remains a troubling issue for the church, especially in English-speaking countries where victims sued dioceses found to have moved around abusive priests.

On Wednesday, news reports in California showed that one cardinal elector, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, the former archbishop of Los Angeles, the diocese and an ex-priest had reach a settlement of almost $10 million in four child sexual abuse cases, according to the victims’ lawyers.

Becoming pope also has a human dimension. In one of his final speeches as pope before he retired on Feb. 18, Benedict said that his successor would need to be prepared to lose some of his privacy.

The US added 236,000 new jobs in February as the unemployment rate edged down to 7.7%, its lowest level since December 2008. The figures easily beat economists' predictions that the US would add 160,000 jobs in February and look set to drive US stock markets to new record highs.

This is 29th month in a row that the US has added jobs. On average, 183,000 jobs were added each month in all of 2012. In past three months, that pace has picked up to an average of about 195,000 a month.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said the job gains were made in professional and business services, construction, and healthcare. In a sign of the improving housing market, the construction industry added 48,000 in February. Since September, construction employment has risen by 151,000.

There are still major issues in the job market, however. The number of long-term unemployed – those jobless for 27 weeks or more – was unchanged in February at 4.8m. These individuals accounted for 40.2% of the unemployed. The unemployment rates for teenagers (25.1%), black people (13.8%), and Hispanics (9.6%) remained high and showed little or no change.

The number of people not in the labour force rose to 90.1m in February, up from 89.9m in January and 88.3 million in February 2012.

The news comes after payroll giant ADP's latest poll concluded that the private sector added 198,000 jobs in February, higher than the 175,000 forecast by economists. The firm also revised its January number up to 215,000, 22,000 higher than its initial estimate.

Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics, which compiles the report with ADP, said: "The job market remains sturdy in the face of significant fiscal headwinds. Businesses are adding to payrolls more strongly at the start of 2013 with gains across all industries and business sizes. Tax increases and government spending cuts don't appear to be affecting the job market."

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The jobs figures and better than expected figures from the service sector helped drive US stock markets to all time highs this week. On Tuesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average passed levels unseen since before the start of the recession.

Dow futures contracts, a shaky indication of the direction the stock market is likely to take, were rising before the New York Stock Exchange opened, suggesting the index could hit new highs Friday.

Oscar Pistorius, who ran in the Olympics on carbon-fibre blades, has been arrested and charged with the murder of his girlfriend, who was shot dead at his home in Pretoria. Her name was Reeva Steenkamp and she was twenty-nine years old. There has been talk in the press that he mistook her for an intruder, and maybe he did—the investigation is in its first stages. Brigadier Denise Beukes said, though, that “we are not sure where this report came from; it definitely didn’t come from the South African police service.” Beukes, who did not use Steenkamp’s name, pending her family’s identification of the body (though it was widely reported), added that there was no other suspect involved. There were witnesses—“we’re talking about neighbors and people that heard things”—but “the only two persons on the premises were the resident and the deceased.”

Google Glass’ Women Problems

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Go to Columnist Page February 23, Pompom Girl for Feminism

By MAUREEN DOWD

SHERYL SANDBERG is not one to settle for being the It Girl of Silicon Valley.

Nor is the chief operating officer of Facebook willing to write a book that people might merely read.

One of her friends from her Harvard days told Vogue that the brainy, beautiful, charming, stylish, happily married 43-year-old mother of two, one of the world’s richest self-made women, has an “infectious insistence.” (She would have to, having founded Harvard’s aerobics program in the ’80s, wearing blue eye shadow and leg warmers.)

Now that she has domesticated the Facebook frat house, Sandberg wants to be “the pompom girl for feminism,” as she calls it. She has a grandiose plan to become the PowerPoint Pied Piper in Prada ankle boots reigniting the women’s revolution — Betty Friedan for the digital age. She wants women to stop limiting and sabotaging themselves.

The petite corporate star is larger than life, and a normal book tour for “Lean In,” which she describes as “sort of a feminist manifesto” mixed with career advice, just won’t do.

“I always thought I would run a social movement,” she said in “Makers,” an AOL/PBS documentary on feminist history.

Sandberg may have caught the fever to change the world from Mark Zuckerberg, or come by it genetically. She writes that her mother, at age 11, responded to a rabbi’s sermon on tikkun olam, the Jewish concept of repairing the world, by “grabbing a tin can and knocking on doors to support civil rights workers in the South.”

The charmed Sandberg is no Queen Bee. Unlike some other women who reach the top, she does not pull up the ladder, or jungle gym, as she prefers to think of it, behind her. Many women found it inspiring when she said in “Makers” that she left work at 5:30 to go home to her kids, even while they acknowledged that you might have to be Sheryl Sandberg to get away with that.

Sandberg, who worked at the Treasury Department for her mentor, Larry Summers, and at Google before going to Facebook, started a group called the Women of Silicon Valley to listen to celebrity speakers and swap stories.

She knows there is slow evolution or even erosion in women’s progress in some areas, and that many younger women don’t want to be called feminists. Professional women often take their husbands’ last names these days without a thought.

Her book is chockablock with good tips and insights, if a bit discouraging at times. She urges women in salary negotiations to smile frequently and use the word “we” instead of “I.” And she encourages employers and women to talk upfront about plans for children, which employers may fear is lawsuit fodder.

She seems to think she can remedy social paradigms with a new kind of club — a combo gabfest, Oprah session and corporate pep talk. (Where’s the yoga?)

Sandberg has been recruiting corporations to join her Lean In Foundation, which will create the Lean In Community and Lean In Circles, which are, as The Times’s Jodi Kantor wrote, like “consciousness-raising groups of yore.” The circles will entail 8 to 12 peers who will meet monthly and use “education modules” to learn the skills to pursue equality. (Like how Rosa Parks used bus modules.) The debut assignment is a video on how to command more authority by altering how you speak and sit.

Women are encouraged to send in stories about leaning in, but no sad sacks allowed: “Share a positive ending about what you learned from the experience,” says the instructional material for Lean In Circles. And no truants: “Don’t invite flakes.”

That leaves me leaning out.

Sandberg has already gotten some flak from women who think that her attitude is too elitist and that she is too prone to blame women for failing to get ahead. (Not everyone has Larry Page and Sergey Brin volunteering to baby-sit, and Zuckerberg offering a shoulder to cry on.) Noting that her Facebook page for “Lean In” looks more like an ego wall with “deep thoughts,” critics argue that her unique perch as a mogul with the world’s best husband to boot makes her tone-deaf to the problems average women face as they struggle to make ends meet in a rough economy, while taking care of kids, aging parents and housework.

Sandberg describes taking her kids to a business conference last year and realizing en route that her daughter had head lice. But the good news was that she was on the private eBay jet.

Sandberg may mean well, and she may be setting up a run for national office. But she doesn’t understand the difference between a social movement and a social network marketing campaign. Just because digital technology makes connecting possible doesn’t mean you’re actually reaching people.

People come to a social movement from the bottom up, not the top down. Sandberg has co-opted the vocabulary and romance of a social movement not to sell a cause, but herself.

She says she’s using marketing for the purpose of social idealism. But she’s actually using social idealism for the purpose of marketing.

Copyright. 2013. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

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