"The Pope is surrounded by the loyalty of the faithful," said a commentator for RAI, Italian public television, as it dutifully broadcast Pope Benedict XVI's colourful open air Mass live from Yaounde in Cameroon today, halfway through his first trip to Africa as pontiff.

The Italian press, however, normally equally deferential to the pontiff, told a different story on its front pages: "Aids and condoms, Europe lines up against the Pope" ran a typical headline in La Stampa, which added: "The Church is immobile. The Pope really must pay greater attention to the political impact of the positions he takes."

The reaction to the Pope's remarks on condoms – made on the papal aircraft before he even set foot in Cameroon – has certainly been vociferous. Yesterday the French, Belgian and German governments publicly rebuked Pope Benedict, saying his assertion that condoms could make the Aids problem worse (or, in the amended Vatican version, "risked" doing so) posed a threat to decades of public health policy designed to "protect human life".

Alain Juppe, the former French Prime Minister, said: "This Pope is starting to be a real problem." In Germany, the Pope's homeland, the health and development ministers said in a joint statement that "condoms save lives, as much in Europe as in other countries".

The UN Aids agency said that condoms were a vital part of the battle against HIV, which infects more than 7,000 people a day. Alain Fogue, an Aids campaigner in Cameroon, asked if Pope Benedict was living in the 21st century, adding: "The people will not follow what the Pope is saying. He lives in heaven and we are on earth."

To some extent the Vatican's surprise in the face of this onslaught is understandable. That the Pope and the Vatican are against contraception is not exactly a revelation. "If the Pope had approved of condoms rather than condemning them, then that would have been news," one baffled Vatican official remarked.

Father Federico Lombardi, the Pope's spokesman, maintained that the pontiff was simply upholding the position of the Church that the spread of Aids can be prevented by abstinence or sexual fidelity.

"Don't expect any change of position during this trip," Father Lombardi said in Yaounde, the Cameroonian capital. "It is not through the power of condoms that one blocks the spread of Aids." The condom row, complained L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, has been "exploited" by anti-Catholics to overshadow a successful visit to the continent where Catholicism is growing fastest.

But on a series of issues since his election nearly four years ago – from Islam to homosexuality and Holocaust denial – neither Pope Benedict nor his advisers seem to have had the faintest idea of the impact his words might have in a globalised world where news travels in a flash. On the flight to Africa Pope Benedict insisted that he did "not feel in any way alone" despite criticism of his "isolation" and remote style of papal rule.

"To tell the truth I have to laugh when faced with this myth about my solitude," he said. "Every day I see those who work with me, the heads of dicasteries [Vatican departments] and the bishops." But unlike Pope John Paul II, his predecessor, Pope Benedict does not meet a variety of people from within and outside the Church over lunch or dinner. He is closeted in his study much of the day. The internet is a mystery to many Vatican officials. Some do not even have direct telephone dialling, let alone broadband.

Benedict remains a shy, professorial German theologian: only someone out of touch with the real world could have said, as the Pope did recently in a highly unusual personal letter to bishops worldwide, that the uproar that followed his reinstatement of an ultraconservative bishop who denies that millions of Jews were murdered in Nazi gas chambers was an "unforeseeable mishap".

There has been a series of such "mishaps", making the Pope appear as gaffe-prone as Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister – but with more serious consequences. Last weekend the Vatican backtracked on its approval of Brazilian bishops for excommunicating doctors who performed an abortion on a nine-year-old girl raped by her stepfather.

There are reports of dismay inside the Curia (the Vatican hierarchy), and of an incipient rebellion against Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Secretary of State (Vatican Prime Minister), who is the Pope's most trusted aide, with demands that he should step down in December when he reaches 75, the normal retirement age for bishops.

What is needed, however, is a thorough overhaul of Vatican public relations. The Roman Catholic Church’s teaching on papal infallibility is often misunderstood: formulated at the First Vatican Council in 1870 and reaffirmed at the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, it refers only to "definitive and binding" doctrinal pronouncements on faith and morals.

But the Pope needs to become, if not infallible, then at least less fallible on worldly matters. In May he goes to the Holy Land, partly to repair the damage done to Jewish-Christian relations by the Holocaust denial episode.

Unless the Vatican gets a grip on its PR operation, stepping into the minefield of Arab-Israeli relations could set off explosive "mishaps" with consequences not only for relations between the three great monotheistic faiths but the wider Middle East.

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