LONDON, Dec 11: The Vatican is suffering from “muddled messaging” partly as a result of cardinals' technophobia and “ignorance about 21st-century communications”, complained the deputy chief of America's mission to the Holy See.

The pontiff's inner circle has only one Blackberry between them, used by a papal spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, and few have email accounts, according to Julieta Valls Noyes in a cable in Jan 2009 on why the Vatican is failing to deliver Pope Benedict's message.

“Most of the top ranks of the Vatican, all men, generally in their seventies, do not understand modern media and new information technologies,” Noyes said.

Instead, they tend towards old-fashioned communications written in “coded” language which are so hard to decipher that when the Vatican sent the Israeli ambassador a statement that was supposed to contain a positive message for his country, it was so veiled he missed it, even when told it was there.

The problems mean the pontiff's “moral megaphone” is operating at reduced volume, said Noyes.

The pope's 2006 speech in Regensburg, Germany, was widely decried as insulting to Muslims, though he later explained he had no such intent, and in 2009 he decided to reinstate communion with schismatic Lefebvrist bishops who included a Holocaust denier, about which Lombardi knew nothing until it had happened.—Dawn-Guardian News Service