A papal trip to Malta would not normally attract world attention,but these are not normal times in the Vatican. The Pope's first overseas engagement since the sex abuse scandal embroiled the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy will take place in the full glare of the media the same media that some of his supporters accuse of waging a campaign against him and their religion.

The blame game the Vatican has also attributed its woes to homosexuals, the Holocaust, the Irish, and even the Devil speaks to a wider problem in the Church's handling of accusations that it conspired to cover up paedophilia committed by its clergy. Only in the past few days have Vatican officials scrambled to find a coherent strategy to try to control a scandal that has inflicted immeasurable damage on the institution.

"The problem is not that the Vatican line over the crisis has had unfortunate consequences," said Andrea Tornielli, the biographer of Pope Benedict XVI and other modern pontiffs. "The problem is that there is no line."

Even as the Pope faced accusations that he had covered up instances of clerical abuse while Archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982, and later as head of doctrine at the Vatican for 24 years, there was no co-ordinated rebuttal. In the corporate world, the response to such a public relations disaster would be crisis management, but the Vatican's ancient bureaucracy, and a centuries-old culture of secrecy is ill equipped to meet the demands of communications strategies.

"We are not a multinational," Father Federico Lombardi, the Pope's spokesman, said recently. The Holy See, he said, "does not believe it is necessary to respond to every single document taken out of context".