Like other Vatican watchers over the past few weeks, I have suggested that as Pope Benedict prepares for his crucial trip to the Holy Land next month, the Vatican needs to overhaul its PR operation. This comes in the wake of a series of papal public relations disasters, from the affair over Bishop Williamson Holocaust denial to the row during Pope Benedict's African trip over condoms and HIV/Aids.

As William Rees Mogg wrote in The Times the other day: "The media have moved into a 24-hour, seven-day global news system. The Vatican has not. It is no longer possible to run a national government as a small-scale news operation. The Roman Catholic Church is a worldwide structure with more than a billion members. This Pope succeeded John Paul II who was a genius at communication. He does not have the same charisma. He should professionalise the Vatican's news operation".

There are rumours of a restructuring of Vatican PR after Easter. Although there is another view: that however slick and professional a PR operation is, it will fail if the message it is trying to convey is not coherent. The behind the scenes problem is that the Curia, the Vatican hierarchy which is supposed to advise and support him, is fractious and divided, and (as he himself has hinted) often seems set on undermining him as much as (or even more than) backing him up.

As Sandro Magister, the Vatican watcher of L'Espresso, wrote recently in a piece headlined "La Santa Intolleranza", or "Holy Intolerance", the Pope is not as "isolated" as is often suggested. Although it is true he is a professorial German theologian, sees few visitors compared to John Paul II and closets himself away to write his books, homilies and encyclicals, many "ordinary Catholics" around the world agree with what he says in his determination to shore up the core Catholic faith.

Where he is "isolated", paradoxically, is in Rome itself, Magister suggests, partly because he has paid little attention to the manoeuvrings and power struggles within the Curia, either as a cardinal or as Pope. His mind is on higher matters. The first volume of his study of "Jesus of Nazareth" was a global bestseller. "But if you ask prelates in the Curia if they have read it", Magister writes, ""almost all of them say no".

In this take on the situation, it is within the Curia, not in the broader Catholic world, that there is "hostility" towards Benedict and towards his Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, a warm and genial Salesian who is resented by some in the hierachy as "not one of us". That is, he was a trusted aide to the former Cardinal Ratzinger at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has no background in diplomacy, and was brought back from Genoa, where he had not long been archbishop, to be at the side of the new Pope.

Cardinal Bertone, they say in the Vatican corridors, does not even see eye-to-eye with his deputy, the powerful and experienced "sostituto", Archbishop Fernando Filoni, an expert on China, Asia and the Middle East (Filoni was Nuncio in Baghdad during the US invasion and the fall of Saddam, and came close to being killed when a car bomb exploded next to the nunciature, observing nonchalantly "Thank God we survived").

Perhaps it was to intrigues within the Vatican as much as to disagreement among Catholics in the wider world that the Pope was referring when - quoting St Paul - he made his remarkable reference to believers "biting and devouring one another" in his letter to bishops explaining the "unforeseeable mishap" of the Williamson affair.

The Pope wrote: "Dear Brothers, during the days when I first had the idea of writing this letter, by chance, during a visit to the Roman Seminary, I had to interpret and comment on Galatians 5:13-15. I was surprised at the directness with which that passage speaks to us about the present moment: "Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love be servants of one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’. But if you bite and devour one another, take heed that you are not consumed by one another.""

He added. "I am always tempted to see these words as another of the rhetorical excesses which we occasionally find in Saint Paul. To some extent that may also be the case. But sad to say, this "biting and devouring" also exists in the Church today, as expression of a poorly understood freedom. Should we be surprised that we too are no better than the Galatians? That at the very least we are threatened by the same temptations? That we must always learn anew the proper use of freedom? And that we must always learn anew the supreme priority, which is love?"

He then added, revealingly: "I would like to offer heartfelt thanks to all the many Bishops who have lately offered me touching tokens of trust and affection, and above all assured me of their prayers."

Talking of the Curia, I recently attended a farewell dinner at the British Embassy to the Holy See for Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, who is stepping down as Archbishop of Westminster. There was of course intense speculation about his successor (for an informed view see my colleague Ruth Gledhill's pieces on this, eg here).

Those who write about the Vatican and the Church, from London or Rome, sometimes refer airily to "senior Vatican sources". The room on this occasion was packed with the genuine article: I found myself next to Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, head of the Congregation for Bishops, Cardinal William Levada, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Cardinal Murphy O'Connor. At other tables were Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, head of the Council for Interreligious Dialogue, and Cardinal Zen Ze-kiun of Hong Kong.

An impressive turn out for Cardinal Cormac, and surely a sign of the affection and admiration in which he is held. He in turn paid tribute to Francis Campbell, the British Ambassador to the Holy See, pointing out that thanks to his energy and clout, Gordon Brown's recent visit to the Pope had been the fourth by a British Prime Minister in six years, whereas in the previous 30 years there was just one such visit. An interview with Ambassador Campbell - the first Roman Catholic to be Britain's envoy to the Pope since the Reformation - by my Irish Times colleague Paddy Agnew can be found here.

Cardinal Levada, by the way, told me that when he accompanied Pope Benedict to the United States last year, the Pope introduced Cardinal Levada to then President Bush as "my successor" - meaning, of course, his successor as head of Doctrine of the Faith, not as Pope. This was evidently not immediately clear to Bush, however, and the expression on his face was apparently something to behold.