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Former Executive Takes Mormon Helm

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By KIRK JOHNSON, The New York Times

Published: February 5, 2008

An 80-year-old former advertising and publishing executive, Thomas S. Monson, was named on Monday to be the 16th president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, one week after the death of the previous president, Gordon B. Hinckley.

Monson's appointment was expected. Leadership changes in the 13-million member Mormon Church are based on seniority in the upper ranks, which makes the transition free of politics and guarantees a certain mantle of age. Hinckley was 84 when he got the job in 1995. He died at age 97.

In a news conference at church headquarters in Salt Lake City, Monson said he had worked with Hinckley for more than four decades in various assignments, and hinted at no significant departures.

"He blazed the trail," Monson said of his predecessor.

Monson's appointment comes at a time of expectation and anxiety in the Mormon world. The number of converts, especially in South America and Africa, rose sharply under Hinckley as missionary work - usually young men, working in pairs on two-year assignments - expanded.

But Hinckley also wrestled with the problem of structure in the far-flung corners of the church, and how to keep converts engaged and active after the missionaries departed.

That a Mormon is running for president - former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts is trying to become the Republican nominee - has also put a spotlight on the church and its beliefs and practices.

How Mormons fit in the fabric of mainstream America, and how they do not, has become the subject of a political debate that will only intensify if Romney advances toward the nomination.

Monson, whose elevation to the church presidency also makes him a prophet of God in the eyes of Mormon believers, was born in Salt Lake City. He has lived a life - common in the Mormon church, where there is no professional paid clergy - that has straddled the business and religious worlds.

His career, beginning in the late 1940s in advertising and later as sales manager for the Deseret News Press, a commercial printing firm then affiliated with the church, went hand-in-hand with his advancement into bigger assignments for the church.

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