In more than 21 years working as a reporter for The Times, with nearly all of that time spent writing on religion, I have just once managed to get through to the Vatican press office by telephone. On that occasion, about ten years ago, I was asked to “hold” and then cut off after waiting for half an hour.

So when the opportunity came to attend a seminar in Rome titled “The Church Up Close: Covering Catholicism in the Age of Benedict XVI”, I uttered a quick Ave and leapt on a plane to Rome.

Like the monarchy in Britain, the Roman Catholic Church is a body that almost transcends the need to practise the black art of PR. Rather like Christ’s own famous seven “I ams” in the Gospels, Her Majesty and His Holiness need do little more than utter the words “I am who I am”, and the world kneels to pay its respects. Or, at least, that is how it has been for centuries. But with increasing globalisation combined with the terrifying immediacy of the written word, both institutions have had to rethink.

“We were pretty bad at communications, we were forced to learn and now we are giving courses on it,” said Jack Valero, of Opus Dei, the organisation that ran the seminar at its Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome.

A few years ago, before the Da Vinci Code phenomenon, a flyer about a seminar for journalists organised by Opus Dei would have been greeted with howls of derision and binned. One of the many ironies of the post-Dan Brown Catholic Church is that Opus Dei has moved into the mainstream, perhaps because the novel was too far-fetched even for the most credulous of anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists. And at least the organisation is trying to help.

Valero said: “The seminar was held for the first time two years ago at the request of some foreign correspondents in Rome who were being asked to report on the Vatican and the Catholic Church and who felt they needed more background in order to report it accurately. They felt they were missing the appropriate reference points to make sense of the news items or controversies.”

It was first held as a series of evening events over two months and repeated again the following year. The sessions were in Italian. This year, for the first time, the sessions were put together into a single week so that journalists from different countries could attend, and it was held in English. The idea now is to hold it every two years.

“The main purpose is to provide accurate background to journalists who need to report on the Catholic Church or the Pope and who are not Catholic or even perhaps religious. The University of the Holy Cross faculty of communications was set up ten years ago precisely to study corporate communications in and about the Church and its institutions. When preparing the seminar, the faculty tried to enlist the help of professors and others with different perspectives so that all the different sensibilities existing within the Catholic Church would be represented,” Valero said.

“Opus Dei is about sanctifying one’s work. If that work is in communication, then it’s important that it should be done well, truthfully, with the proper background and information. This seminar should help with this.”

There were about 40 of us from all over the world. Journalists were mainly from the Church press, but mainstream newspapers included The Guardian and The New York Times. Journalists fresh from covering the troubles in Kenya and Orissa in India were also there.

Specialists from almost every department of the Church, from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith down, attempted to give us in the space of an hour or two lectures that compressed 90 hours’ worth of the kind of knowledge imparted to seminarians at the English College. Among the best were England’s own Professor Brian Ferme, a former Oxford don who now lectures in canon law at the St Pius X Institute in Venice, Professor Elizabeth Lev, an art historian at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and Francis Campbell, British Ambassador to the Holy See. Monsignor Christopher Nalty from the Congregation for the Clergy favoured us with a tour of the scavi, the Roman necropolis beneath St Peter’s. Professor Marta Bertolaso summarised the Church’s teaching on bioethics, and Father Cassian Folsom, Prior of the Monastery of San Benedetto in Norcia, Perugia, went through the detail on the recent Motu Proprio and the Old Mass. That was one of the most moving of all, being addressed with such care by a monk in traditional habit in the ultra-modern setting of the Opus Dei university.

While listening and taking notes, I had at the same time to answer queries on my BlackBerry from the newsdesk in London about creationism and prepare a comment piece for the next day’s newspaper in the light of the controversial Royal Society speech by Professor Michael Reiss. Managing to please both masters, secular and the divine, without appearing rude or distracted is one of the great challenges confronting religion journalists in the modern era.

Covering the Catholic Church has been another increasingly daunting challenge. Articles in The Times now have a global audience because they appear online. Ignorance of how things are done in Rome or the US is no excuse any more. Just as the Church needs for its own sake to respond to our needs, so we have to act on the imperative to understand its needs and the culture in which it operates.

Even in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where doctrinal cases of 30 years ago and more still languish in piles of papers on desks in hidden offices, things are changing.

Just to test out the new era, I called the Vatican press office on my return to check on the growing speculation about the Pope’s forthcoming encyclical. The phone was answered immediately, and I was put straight through to a member of staff at Vatican Radio. He knew nothing about the encyclical, or if he did he wasn’t telling, but at least he was there and willing to pick up the phone.