New Pope is conservative with common touch; Catholic Church's shift southward; Why the World Bank group president visited Uttar Pradesh

1 New Pope is conservative with common touch (Emily Schmall & Larry Rohter in The New York Times) Like most of those in Argentina, he is a soccer fan, his favorite team being the underdog San Lorenzo squad. Known for his outreach to the country’s poor, he gave up a palace for a small apartment, rode public transportation instead of a chauffeur-driven car and cooked his own meals.

The new pope, Jorge Mario Bergoglio (pronounced ber-GOAL-io), 76, will be called Francis. He is in some ways a history-making pontiff, the first from the Jesuit order and the first pope from Latin America.

But Cardinal Bergoglio is also a conventional choice, a theological conservative of Italian ancestry who vigorously backs Vatican positions on abortion, gay marriage, the ordination of women and other major issues — leading to heated clashes with Argentina’s left-leaning president.

He was less energetic, however, when it came to standing up to Argentina’s military dictatorship during the 1970s as the country was consumed by a conflict between right and left that became known as the Dirty War. He has been accused of knowing about abuses and failing to do enough to stop them while as many as 30,000 people were disappeared, tortured or killed by the dictatorship.

Despite the criticism, many here praise Cardinal Bergoglio — who likes the more humble title of Father Jorge — as a passionate defender of the poor and disenfranchised.

2 Catholic Church’s shift southward (The New York Times) In 1900, two-thirds of the world’s Catholics lived in Europe. Today only 20% do.

Over the last century, much of the growth of the Roman Catholic Church has been outside Europe, and there are now more than 200 million more Catholics in Latin America than in Europe.

3 Why the World Bank group president visited Uttar Pradesh (Prasanta Sahu in The Wall Street Journal) World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim spent a significant chunk of his three-day trip in India in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. India has the highest number of poor people in world: about 400 million people, or over 30% of its 1.24 billion people, according to World Bank data. Over half of U.P.’s population of 200 million lives on less than $1.25 a day.

This makes U.P. central to the World Bank’s poverty eradication strategy. Mr. Kim said that unless significant progress is made in U.P., it will be difficult to eradicate poverty in India, and in the world more broadly.

India is the largest client of the World Bank, which has lent the country around $26 billion over the past five years. Mr. Kim said the bank plans to lend between $3 billion and $5 billion a year to India from 2014 to 2018.

“The World Bank Group’s mission of eradicating global poverty and boosting shared prosperity cannot be fulfilled if Uttar Pradesh continues to be home to 66 million of India’s poor – the highest in any state,” Mr. Kim said in Lucknow, U.P., on Tuesday.