Secular interests — economic and political — are just below the surface of religion in this part of the world. This is one of the reasons religion is such a sensitive issue here. Benedict has on occasion shown himself — how can one put it? — less than sure-footed in dealing with the region's sensitivities, and it was a gaffe-hungry papal press corps that descended on the Holy Land.

For a while, it all seemed to be going so well. The three speeches Benedict delivered on his first day in Israel are really rather beautiful texts. He spoke expressively, and his English was clear. He dealt with anti-Semitism unambiguously, and outlined the Vatican's support for a two-state solution for the region tactfully but in explicit terms (circumlocution would have offended the Palestinians). At Yad Vashem, he reflected on the importance of individual stories of suffering amid the enormity of the Holocaust. Some of the headlines the following morning took him to task over the Yad Vashem address. As a German of his generation, the argument ran, he should have said something more personal. And Benedict was attacked for saying that Jews were "killed" rather than "murdered" by the Nazis. But many Israelis I spoke to felt that the criticism was inhospitable and ungenerous.

Enter the Vatican's press spokesman, Fr Frederico Lombardi. Stung by those headlines, Fr Lombardi declared that Benedict had "never, never, never" been in the Hitler Youth. Since the Pope has himself stated the contrary clearly, this proved difficult for the papal spokesman to sustain. So Lombardi rowed back a bit, saying only that the young Joseph Ratzinger had been "obliged" to join. This somehow made things worse. No one serious has, as far as I am aware, ever suggested that Benedict was once an enthusiastic Nazi, but if the Vatican feels compelled to deny something...we had our gaffe — a modest one, certainly, but a gaffe nonetheless.       

The American scholar George Weigel has argued eloquently in these pages that Benedict's problem lies in the poor quality of his advisers, and the Lombardi debacle lends weight to this. But when something silly like this happens, I find myself drawn to re-examine some of the other, more serious rows Benedict has sparked. The more I reflect on them, the more unsettled I become.