They have ruled the country for the last 56 years – longer than any other party in the world with the exception of the communists in China, North Korea and Cuba – and they face the very real possibility of an extended stay the uncomfortable wilderness that is the political opposition.

The current Prime Minister, Najib Razak, has done what he can to avoid it.

He heads the dominant United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) within the coalition and he’s criss-crossed the country warning of economic ruin and a stock market collapse if the opposition wins.

The prime minister has four years of strong economic growth to rest on – but he has been unable to eliminate the view,  particularly in the minds of younger, urban voters that his party is corrupt and out of touch.

The government’s affirmative action programs, which favour ethnic Malays in everything from jobs to education, are deeply unpopular for example with minority Chinese and Indian populations.

Still, Prime Minister Najib was looking pretty relaxed at the voting booth this morning – and he congratulated everyone for the turn out tonight on twitter:

He wrote: “EC has confirmed that 80 per cent of the 13 million eligible voters cast their ballots today. Msia’s highest ever voter turnout! A proud day”

The opposition’s three-party People’s Alliance (PKR) has a real chance of kicking the prime minister out of office however.

It’s led by the charismatic Anwar Ibrahim – a one-time deputy prime minister – fired in 1998 and subsequently jailed on corruption and sodomy charges.

Mr Ibrahim says the charges were fabricated by his political enemies. Regardless, he has re-risen phoenix-like on to the national stage and led a campaign that’s generated real passion and enthusiasm.

Hundreds of thousands attended his rallies and tonight he claims it has all paid off – although he starts his tweet with a few words about phone problems, saying: “Amazing-all the phone lines at PKR HQ are down tonight. PR has won. We urge UMNO and the EC to not attempt to hijack the results.”

The election campaign – which was short at 15 days but fiercely contested – has certainly caught the national imagination.

Millions will stare anxiously at their television stations screens tonight – although many others will choose independent online web-based radio stations – because the National Front/UMNO controls the mainstream media.

Prime Minister Najib was interviewed on national television today by a man wearing a shirt with his party’s logo on it.

A tweet from twitter account holder Typical Malaysian‏on revealed the national mood. It read: “The last time Malaysians were this excited over an event is the Olympics 2012 Badminton finals. Fact.”

That excitement could turn to disillusionment – or even violence – if the public views the final results as unfair or unrepresentative.  There have been plenty of complaints already.

The police has recorded 2,000 cases of arson, fighting, explosions and other election-related crimes since parliament was dissolved. Tonight we are hearing allegations that the ruling National Front flew in foreign nationals and Malayasians were reportedly offered £100 each to make the trip south to cast their votes.

It’s enough to keep many in Malaysia on edge.

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I have just received a couple of photos from one of the members of the climbing expedition, British photographer and filmmaker Jonathan Griffith and these pictures help paint a picture of what really happened.

The visiting mountaineers – climbing superstars Uli Steck, Simone Moro – along with Mr Griffith, decided their attempt on Everest would be as close to the “pure alpine experience” as possible. In practice that meant foregoing the sort of kit and comforts that most Everest climbers take as standard – like bottled oxygen and Sherpa guides to carry luggage and fix the rope lines.

The trouble started as the men acclimatised on a colossal sheet of vertical ice called the Lhotse face, above Camp 2 on Everest’s western face.

While attempting to skirt around a group of Sherpa guides fixing ropes into the ice for their paying customers, Uli Steck collided with one of them. The Sherpas also claimed that the Europeans kicked ice into the path of other guides who were working down below.

In the second photo you can see Uli Steck approaching the Sherpas on the Lhotse face.

When the three Europeans descended to Camp 2, they say 100 to 150 Sherpas were waiting for them. Jonathan Griffith told us, “they hadn’t come to discuss things …they’d come to attack us.” What followed must rank as the highest altitude brawl in human history. Punches and rocks were thrown and the visiting climbers say their lives were threatened. Another group of western climbers intervened and managed to calm the situation down.

In the third photo, taken just after the confrontation you can see the relieved faces of Messrs Griffith, Steck and Moro.

It is not immediately clear what caused this dispute – nothing like it has taken place before we’re told. But it may have something to do with increased competition for a precious resource – space on the mountain. Last year, hundreds of people tried to summit Everest – the vast majority using the same route during the same two month climbing season. It’s possible that the European’s “pure alpine” approach was received less enthusiastically by the guides who try to make a living on this treacherous mountain.

Brett Archibald is a 50-year-old South African who signed up for a 10 day surfing expedition off the remote Mentawai Islands in Indonesia. The tour organisers, All Aboard Travel, says the region offers some of the best waves on the planet – but prospective surf-adventurers have to endure a 10 hour  overnight crossing on the Indian Ocean to get there.

Mr Archibald and his friends were on the way out to the islands when the mishap happened. The weather was rough and at about 4:30 am, he says he went up on deck to relieve himself. In an interview with Surfing Life conducted via satellite phone, Archibald said, “I released I was really seasick. I had two really big vomits and then I think I blacked out while I was retching.”

When Brett Archibald regained consciousness, he was in the drink without a life jacket, watching the boat plough off into the distance. Oblivious to his plight, his friends slept – or battled sea-sickness in the cabins below deck.

Several hours later, the crew and passengers of the Naga Laut raised the alarm, notifying the Indonesian authorities and Archibald’s family back home. His wife Anita and the team at the tour operator pitched in and within hours the Indonesian maritime rescue service and a number of private charter operators were on the look out for the 50-year-old.

In the meantime, Archibald was involved in a gruesome battle for survival. “The night was carnage”, he said. “I had sharks swimming past me. I got stung by a jelly fish. Seagulls even tried to pick my eyes out and I have got big holes in my nose.”

“It was insane, just insane. I actually gave up.”

Still, Archibald says he pulled himself together and managed to swim and tread water for 28 hours – although he says he nearly drowned eight times.

The sight of the ketch Barrenjoey at 6:30am yesterday morning brought an emotional end to the ordeal. The boat belonged to Australians John and Belinda McGroder and they said he was “buoyed by a rush of adrenalin,” when they found him.

Craig Jarvis of All Aboard Tours told Channel 4 News tonight, “he still has a bit of damage to his kidneys and lungs due to dehydration, but other than that, he’s fine – just incredibly exhausted.”

Mr Jarvis had a surprise announcement. Archibald’s experience, not so horrific that he is prepared to cancel his plans for the next eight days – yes, Brett Archibald is going to continue his holiday.

That’s one hardy surfer.

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Yet after speaking with defectors and activists, I have come to understand this formidable looking frontier as old and creaking technology. The outside world is beginning to seep through it – and as you’ll see in our Channel 4 News report – this process has the potential to change the nation from within.

Through the auspices of the respected advocacy group Citizens’ Alliance for North Korea, we met a Korean defector called Kim Jin Sun. She fled North Korean several months ago and offered us a frank and contemporary account of life on the inside.

Through necessity, Ms Kim began to work in a market in North Korea; “After I got married we didn’t have enough money – I realised what real poverty was – so I started selling clothes from China. It was illegal, but it’s the only way we could survive.”  Markets are banned Korea but after the collapse of the country’s food distribution system in the 1990’s, people had to hustle, trade – or steal – to survive – few could rely on the patronage of the state. In Ms Kim’s case, Chinese traders gave her a lifeline – jackets and boots to flog in the streets.

It wasn’t much of a life – “My existence had no meaning,” she said. It was only after she was passed a revolutionary new product however, that she began to ask hard questions. That item was a mobile phone, smuggled in by her sister who had fled to China several months earlier. Their conversations had a powerful effect; “I started to envy my sister’s life and I wondered if I could live like that too. I couldn’t talk long – it was too dangerous – but I built up a fantasy about their lives.”

Equipped with Chinese mobiles, users like Ms Kim, can compare their impoverished lives with the experiences of others on outside. It isn’t simple to use them though – another defector told us that people often have to travel up to the border region to get a signal – and if caught, they risk a spell in prison camp or even execution.

There are other sources of information as well. Ms Kim told us that “tons” of DVDs are now flooding into China; “The videos are distributed around the market. I’d buy one, then exchange it for another with a friend. But there’s only one hour of electricity a day – sometimes in the middle of the night – so you we’d leap out of bed to watch the DVDs.” Ms Kim liked South Korean soap operas – her favourites, Glass Shoes and the curiously entitled Scent of Men. But again, she said the penalty if caught was severe; “death in some cases,” she warned.

Still, some people in North Korea are willing to take these sort of risks – like working in markets, watching illegal programming and so on – and they do because their own government is utterly unable to provide a range of goods and services they want. Here’s Ms Kim again on television; “When you watch North Korean television, it’s just movies from the 1950s and 60s. People are so bored of them – ‘why are they still airing that in the 21st century’ they say. North Koreans have a lot of expectations about international movies and they have a lot of fantasies about international world.”

For North Korea’s leaders such fantasies are dangerous and run counter to their own anti-western propaganda – fundamental in maintaining the peoples’ obedience to the regime. Unsurprisingly then, they’ve acted strongly in recent months to stem the flow of seditious information – the number of defectors coming across the border for example has dramatically slowed say activist groups in Seoul. But that hulking great fence on border isn’t big enough to keep the world out entirely and the rumblings of change have begun.

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Today North Korea prevented South Koreans from crossing the border to work in a jointly operated industrial park – this the only symbol of north-south cooperation we are told.

On Tuesday, North Korea announced plans to restart a nuclear reactor as part of its weapons program – and you are probably familiar with the blood-curdling threats, the abandoned hotlines and a number of shredded agreements as well.

Yet there are a host of good reasons why war will almost certainly be avoided.

1. Playing it cool in South Korea

Nobody in Seoul seems particularly worried – and they are the ones in the firing line. The South Korean media dutifully reports the north’s apocalyptical threats but the public have heard it all before. Investors are not rushing for the exits either – the South Korean stock market posted modest gains last month.

2. Threats – or threats to retaliate?

The threat of all-consuming hell-fire and nuclear war sounds grim, but they are often quoted out of context.

This from BR Myers, who spoke to the New York Times:

“We need to keep in mind that North and South Korea are not so much trading outright threats as trading blustering vows of how they would retaliate if attacked. The north says, ‘If the U.S. or South Korea dare infringe on our territory we will reduce their territory to ashes,’ and Seoul responds by saying it will retaliate by bombing Kim Il-sung statues. And so it goes.”

3. North Korean priorities

The regime needs food and basic supplies. A war with its enemies may win the temporary approval of its people, but it is going to make it even harder to feed them. Here’s two extracts from the 2012 UN national nutrition survey for North Korea, released two weeks ago.

“…nearly 28 per cent of children under five suffer from chronic malnutrition and four per cent are acutely malnourished.”

And it’s not just food.

“Health care services and supplies are unable to meet basic needs. Infrastructure including water and heating systems need repair as education facilities are rapidly deteriorating.”

4. North Korea needs money

A series of new UN resolutions have made it more difficult for the regime to get its hands on foreign currency. Restrictions on trade, on bank transfers, on arms and the purchase of luxury goods have ratcheted up the pain. The Americans claim they will, “bite and bite hard.”

Interestingly, US officials think they would have a bigger problem on their hands if the Kim family ran a country that was self-sufficient and able to provide for itself.

5. North Korea’s only friend is getting irritated

China seems to be getting fed up with the regime. It clearly dislikes Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programme and it says war on the Korean peninsula must be avoided. How irritated China is willing to get with North Korea is unclear however – it’s unlikely to want to see the collapse of its impoverished neighbour.

6. Practice makes perfect

North Korea’s got pedigree – it manufactures crises to bring its enemies to the table. Analysts point out that the regime has engineered some form of military provocation after the inauguration of every new South Korean president since 1992 (new president Park Geun-hye was inaugurated last month), and the regime has a decent record at willing concessions from their arch enemies.

So there, feel any better?

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The newly installed president promised an orderly transition from pariah state to democracy – and what a great story it was.

Government ministers began to dismantle the architecture of the authoritarian state – the release and recent election of long-time dissident, Aung San Suu Kyi served as headline events. In the process, President Sein won the heartfelt thanks of his people – and the admiration of much of the international community.

Yet this transition has unleashed forces that the country’s leaders are struggling to control.

They currently find themselves in the midst a national emergency – a firestorm of ethnic hatred between Buddhists and Muslims in central parts of the country. Over the last week or so, 40 people have been confirmed dead and 12,000 Muslims have been forced to flee their homes – and the violence is edging closer to the country’s largest city, Rangoon.

Last night Thein Sein went on national television to plead with his people; “We must rise above sixty years of historical bitterness, confrontational approaches, and a zero-sum attitude in solving our differences,” he said. There was more to this than a simple call for calm – the country’s transitional leader was threatening to bring back the army. “In general, I do not endorse the use of force to solve problems. However, I will not hesitate to use force as a last resort to protect the lives and safeguard the property of general public.”

Commentators have blamed much of the trouble on the relaxation of social controls. People are largely free to say what they want in Burma, whether it is in the press or online, and this freedom has been used to whip up sectarian and ethnic tensions.

More importantly however, the crisis has also been caused by a lack of leadership at the top – the unwillingness of people like President Sein and Aung San Suu Kyi to take a clear ethical and political position when other Muslim groups – like the Rohingya – were being burnt out of their homes last year in Burma’s north-east.

Some 200 Rohingya were killed last year and 120,000 now live in squalid camps in Rakhine State. Prevented from working or travelling, many thousands have tried to escape in rickety fishing boats – an option that serves only the desperate.

In response, the government and Burma’s political opposition have looked the other way. President Sein suggested deportation as a “solution”: “We will send (the Rohingya) away if any third country would accept them.” It was an incredible – and barely credible proposal – no other country would accept the one million Rohingya who live Burma.

Aung San Suu Kyi refused to get involved, arguing simply that “both sides are to blame” and urging a “return to the rule of law”.

However, in their actions and their statements both leaders have failed to lead. They have failed to check and challenge long-standing prejudices and enmities that exist in Burma – stirred up in part by the military generals who have now departed the scene – and they have failed to paint and sell an inclusive notion of Burmese citizenship to every member of this multi-ethnic and religious population.

Perhaps they are starting to get the message now. Last week, Ms Suu Kyi told reporters that that she viewed the most recent bout of violence,  “as a threat for the whole country as it can spread easily.” President Sein found room in his speech last night to say this: “it is our firm belief that an inclusive democratic society based on equality for all citizens will ensure peace and stability, especially in our country made up of various ethnic nationalities, religious beliefs, and cultures.”

Despite the hope and optimism that most people feel for this nation, its leaders and its institutions are proving weak and ineffectual – and the cost of continuing failure could be dire.

Three thousand delegates marched into the Great Hall of the People (or the G-HOP if you prefer) on Thursday morning, ready to endorse 59-year-old Xi Jinping as the president of the People’s Republic of China.

The event was largely ceremonial - Mr Xi was given the keys to nation’s corner office last November – but it is still a big deal. The election marks a once-in-a-generation leadership transition - the largely anonymous Hu Jintao lost his job today. His deputy, “Grandpa” Wen Jiabao, exits stage-left tomorrow.

Needless to say, referenda in one-party states and the Falkland Islands rarely prove competitive and Mr Xi proved the point, polling an awesome 99.86 per cent of the vote. Still, one brave delegate voted against him.

Twitter and its Chinese equivalent, Weibo, were alive with speculation about who might have done such a thing – nothing credible has surfaced so far.

You can see more on “Chinese election style” in our report tonight – and take a moment to reflect of the job that Xi Jingping has taken on. The Argentinian cardinal isn’t the only one with a billion-plus people on his mind.

No-one really knows what sort of leader Xi Jinping will turn out to be - conservative protector of the ruling elite  or a genuine reformer.

But if he does nothing about corruption, official high handedness, increasing inequality, unbreathable air and undrinkable pig-strewn water, the pressure will build.

Thanks in part to the internet, the Chinese public are changing – increasingly aware and increasingly unhappy with the way they are ruled.

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St Peter had his successor, the 266th Pope. Elected in just over 24 hours, indicative of a conclave which had rallied rapidly around one candidate during five rounds of voting. Out in the square, our feet were soaking wet but we knew our wait was almost over.

Whoops and yells of delight broke out all around us, and a crowd of people lowered their umbrellas, now regardless of the weather, and surged forward towards the papal balcony for their first glimpse of the new Pontiff.

Many were simply too overcome to speak. The Pope is not a semi-divine figure, but many Catholics believe the talent contest which chooses him is inspired by God; he’s also the leader of a flock of some 1.2 billion people, the world’s biggest church, and after a global explosion of scandals involving priests, many Catholics are in need of a new leader bringing with him a new sense of hope, pride and purpose.

For the next two hours the internet and email stopped working, the surge of data spilling out from St Peter’s apparently bringing almost everything crashing down.

A lady from Connecticut managed to get a phone line out, gleefully telling her relatives back home she had seen the smoke and that within forty-five minutes she would see the Pope.

Italians, believers or not, flooded into the square behind us. The Pope is the Bishop of Rome, and the conclave had finished its work just after 7pm, allowing thousands of Roman workers to attend the unveiling of Christ’s new chief vicar on earth.

All we knew was that it would be an old man who had never married or had children. An Italian was said to be favourite, followed by a Brazilian, but an old saying has it that “he who enters the conclave a Pope, leaves it a Cardinal”: in other words, don’t get above yourself, don’t presume to this high office, or it will forsake you.

This may well be what occurred. A friend of mine with good Vatican contacts told me that forty-eight hours earlier, some kind of gentle rebellion had occurred, as Cardinals rallied round a man the media had scarcely talked about or written up as a possible winner.

Then yesterday morning, rumours began swirling around Buenos Aires that their Archbishop had performed well in the first ballot and might be on his way to the papacy. The word was out, despite the fact that every Cardinal swears an oath of secrecy, that all communication is supposed to be cut off, and that the threat of excommunication hangs over every attendant.

When he appeared, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the 76 year old Archbishop of Buenos Aires, cracked a joke about how his fellow Cardinals had gone to the ends of the earth in their search for a new Pope.

His appearance was brief. He offered a prayer for Benedict, his predecessor, who had stunned his Cardinals by becoming the first Pope to abdicate St Peter’s throne in almost 600 years.

Perhaps Benedict was watching at home on television. The pictures, broadcast live by Vatican TV, were stunning, the vast floodlit bells of the Basilica ringing in a new start after what seemed to me a Papacy which had been both uninspiring and overshadowed by scandal.

The man who likes to be known simply as Father Jorge is the first non-European Pope since Gregory, a Syrian, died in the year 741. Named Pope Francis after St Francis of Assisi, he is a man known for a simple life style and compassion for the poor.

He touched many here in Rome last night when he bowed before the crowd and asked them to bless him, rather than just the other way round. “Have a good night and a good rest,” he said before disappearing.

Francis’s family is from Italian immigrant stock, and for now there is no reason not to believe that many Italians won’t take the first Latin American Pope to their hearts.

Doctrinally, little may change. The Argentinian Jesuit has opposed the ordination of women, though he has scolded priests who refused to baptise the children of unmarried mothers; but he has also called gay marriage and adoption “a war against God” and a “manoeuvre by the devil”.

“In the Curia, I would die” he said, when asked what it would be like to work in the Vatican’s medieval and murky system of government. Yet this is what Francis must now do – reform it, simplify it, responding to the church’s critics rather than seemingly lagging behind the curve and struggling to keep up.

Simply being a Latin American won’t reinvigorate the Catholic church on its own. At 76, Francis is only two years younger than Benedict was when he took the Papacy, which by Benedict’s own admission had run out of steam and into old age.

Expect Francis to live sparsely, as closely to his namesake as Vatican grandeur allows; but the message he communicates around the world will be the key to this Pontiff’s success.

“Palazzo Santa Marta!” he told the driver with excitement this morning, before heading off to the Vatican hotel where 115 Cardinals are staying when they are not voting – at all times incommunicado with the outside world.

Cardinal Jorge Urosa from Venezuela and Cardinal Ruben Salazar Gomez from Colombia were rather more Latinate in their approach,  helped inside an austere black sedan by a chauffeur and attendant priests.

“Let’s hope we can have a great Pope very soon,”  Cardinal Urosa told me before waving his magnificent golden ring through the car window and ploughing through Rome traffic, on the way to the biggest event of any Cardinal’s career – choosing the successor to St Peter from within his own ranks.

“It is an awesome experience,” said Cardinal Collins, as we met on the rain sodden pavement of the Papal guest house where this trio of Princes had been living till today. “This isn’t politics….this is the choosing of the vicar of Christ on earth.”

A conclave is a beauty pageant between over-55s in cassocks,  a power struggle which is in theory divinely inspired, which is why Cardinal Collins can say with a straight face that it isn’t politics at all.

The Canadian refused to tell me whom he’d be voting for. The Cardinal from Colombia was no more revealing either. “Anything is possible,” he said when I put it to him that Cardinal Odilo Scherer, from across the border in Brazil, might be his favourite.

Anything is indeed possible, though Marco Politi, a renowned Vatican expert, reckons Cardinal Angelo Scola from Milan is the front runner for the first round, on about 40 votes, with Scherer from Sao Paulo trailing him on 29.

The first Cardinal to achieve a magic two thirds majority – 77 votes – becomes chief shepherd of a global flock of 1.2 billion souls.

“The first ballot will be a referendum on Scola,” Politi says, quoting his extensive Vatican contacts.

“A strong group of Cardinals want to internationalise the papacy and take it to the Americas. On the other hand, if you want to bring order to the Vatican, it would be better to choose an Italian who knows the business.”

An Italian might indeed get to grips with the murky world of the Curia or Vatican government, even if there would be a feeling of “been there, done that” should a son of Italy yet again become the Bishop of Rome.

This morning we saw it thunder, hail and rain over St Peter’s Square as all 115 runners and riders in this race lined up in the paddock of the Basilica to celebrate Mass, all dressed in splendid red and white.

The stormy weather took me back to the opening credits of the South Bank Show, when Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling is lit up with bolts of lightning.  A scurrilous thought crept into my head that maybe the whole conclave would be electrocuted, should this happen for real during the vote.

But a power failure is not what is expected today.  This is a church mired in scandal and poor government which needs to find a consensus candidate as quickly as possible,  in a show of strength and unity by St Peter’s successors.

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As a matter if fact,  this IS my first conclave. And when those 115 cardinals are locked in the Sistine Chapel (“cum clave” means “with a key” in Latin – I never thought studying the subject would come in use) it has the potential to be a very exciting conclave indeed.

The last one in 2005 had an air of predictability about it. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the ultimate Vatican insider, may not have presumed to the top job, but many others certainly presumed on his behalf. He was elected in less than 24 hours.

Nobody in the Vatican would admit they might have made a mistake. After all, it is God’s will who is chosen as leader of his church, even if the Michelangelo frescoes adorning the election are the work of man, while the voters are human of course.

But Pope Benedict’s resignation spoke of his own exhaustion with the task. “Choose someone younger” was clearly this rather sad-looking 85 year old theologian’s subtext as he flew off by helicopter into the Roman sunset last month.

The Pope Emeritus still pulls many strings, though. After all,  Benedict chose 67 of the  115 Princes of the church who will be casting ballots this week.

Yet despite the overwhelming sense of continuity, the feeling that on issues such as abortion and contraception and the celibacy of the priesthood not much will really change, here is the chance, at last, to make history by choosing the first non-European Pope since Gregory, a Syrian, died on the job in the year 741.

Cardinals won’t necessarily think in these geographical terms. They will perhaps look for holiness first, the ability to evangelise globally second (presumably including a fluency in English or Spanish)  and thirdly, and perhaps no less important, a zeal to reform the scandal-ridden church government or “Curia” here in Rome.

The most talked about candidates are Archbishops Angelo Scola from Milan and Odilio Scherer from Sao Paulo in Brazil. Though just to make things confusing, many of the Italian cardinals in the Vatican are said to favour the Brazilian, so this is not quite the old Europe vs new world battle it might first appear.

It would rather please newspaper headline writers if the Brazilians took the papacy, just as they already have the Olympics and the World Cup and this would complete the hat trick, though if it is charisma you are looking for, neither Brazil nor Italy may be the right place to look.

Cast your eye further afield, to the Philippines or Sri Lanka, and you will find cardinals of striking John Paul-like charisma and reported humility. Not perhaps the right people to head a global corporation, but an “outsider” could come through to win the papacy if one of the so called favourites fails to garner enough votes early on.

Several cardinals many of us have heard precious little of might qualify as “Pababile” (“Pope-able”) if this conclave is looking for some sort of celestial spring clean of the rock upon which St Peter built his church.

“It is out with the old, and in with the old,” I wrote from the Vatican on the day Benedict held his last papal audience.

Yes, the next Pope will be an old man who has never married or had children; but surely it will be letting the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics down if this conclave does not choose a Pontiff who breathes new life into the institution.

As one Vatican watcher put it,  the world’s biggest church is searching for “Jesus Christ, but with an MBA”.

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