When Father Federico Lombardi, the Pope’s spokesman, returned from accompanying the Pontiff on his ill-fated trip to Africa in March, he summoned a meeting of his advisers to ask why it had turned into yet another public relations disaster — this time over contraception and Aids.

Some pointed out that it would have helped if the Vatican had not made matters worse by amending the official text of the Pope's remarks post factum to try to soften the impact of his observation that condoms not only fail to prevent Aids but “aggravate” the situation by encouraging sexual promiscuity.

The latest row over the German-born Pope’s membership as a teenager of the Hitler Youth shows that despite that inquest, little has been learnt. Father Lombardi stunned reporters on the Pope’s Holy Land trip by saying that Benedict had “never, never, never” belonged to the Hitler Youth.

The comments overshadowed the historic significance of Benedict’s visit to the Dome of the Rock, which is holy to Muslims — the first such visit by any pontiff — and then to the Western Wall, one of Judaism’s holiest places.

In his 1997 memoirs, Salt of the Earth, the Pope — the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — writes: “As a seminarian, I was registered in the Hitler Youth ... As soon as I was out of the seminary, I never went back.”

Father Lombardi later revised his statement, explaining that the Pope “was enrolled involuntarily into the Hitler Youth but he had no active participation”. He made a distinction between the anti-aircraft auxiliary corps in which the Pope was forcibly enrolled, and full membership of the Hitler Youth, which he described as a corps of fanatical pro-Nazi volunteers.

But the damage was done — and at a stroke undermined the Vatican’s own efforts to put behind it the row over the Pope’s reinstatement in January of an excommunicated ultra-conservative bishop who denies that six million Jews died in Nazi gas chambers.

The Hitler Youth debacle also risks eclipsing the message of peace and reconciliation which Benedict said before leaving Rome was the aim of his pilgrimage. Despite his assertion that the Catholic Church is “irrevocably committed to a genuine and lasting reconciliation between Christians and Jews”, many Israelis found his remorse for the Holocaust when visiting Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, weakly expressed.

Even before the Middle East trip there were persistent rumours in Vatican corridors of a reorganisation of the Pope’s PR. There have been too many “mishaps” during his four-year reign, starting with his remarks about “violent and irrational” Islam in 2006 at Regensburg University in Germany, his alma mater.

Part of the problem is Benedict’s remote style. By nature a shy, professorial theologian, he relies on a handful of advisers and does not — as John Paul did — meet a range of people from all walks of life over lunch or dinner.

He is not helped by the fact that many in the Vatican are unfamiliar with new technology and are focused on Catholic opinion rather than the wider world. Benedict’s media operation is overseen by Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, 67.

“New media technologies are creating a new environment, a new culture,” he said after his appointment. This required “innovative thinking, so that we can better reach out to others and better communicate the Good News to all humanity”.

There is little sign of it: at the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, laptop computers have been introduced, but the internet remains a mystery to many in the Vatican. Insiders recall with nostalgia the days when Joaquin Navarro-Valls, a sharp and briskly efficient former Spanish journalist, ran the PR operation for John Paul.

But then John Paul was a natural media star, a former actor and playwright in his native Poland who instinctively grasped how to get his message across on the world stage. Handling the global image of the scholarly Benedict is another matter.

He can reach out to people in a warm and human way, as he showed when he visited Abruzzo recently to comfort the survivors of last month’s earthquake and to pray for the victims. But too often the Vatican PR machine fails to project this other side of the “theologian Pope”.

Moreover, Father Lombardi, a kindly and genial Jesuit priest, has a double job, running Vatican Radio and Television as well as the Holy See press office. “I don’t think my role is to explain the things the Pope already states in an extraordinarily clear and rich way,” Father Lombardi, 66, said when he took over. That view will change as pressure grows for a PR overhaul when the Pope gets back to Rome.

Times Recommends

• Please help: maimed children of war want their lives back
• Cabal seizes diamond riches to buy power
• White House gatecrashers got to the president