VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI approaches the fourth anniversary of his election next Sunday (Apr. 19) on the heels of the worst crisis of his reign.

His controversial readmission of a Holocaust-denying bishop in late January has not only raised tensions in the Catholic Church’s relations with Jews, but also doubts about Benedict’s leadership.

Despite the pope’s proven strengths as an eloquent and lucid interpreter of traditional Catholic doctrine, the episode has exposed a crucial weakness in his ability to communicate.

Benedict’s avowed aim is to reconcile the progressive and traditionalist tendencies within his church while reaching out to non-believers. But if he hopes to accomplish that, observers say, the 81-year-old pontiff must give greater attention to mundane questions of management and governance.

When the College of Cardinals chose their colleague Joseph Ratzinger to succeed John Paul II in April 2005, liberal Catholics did not hide their disappointment.

“Hard-line,” “enforcer,” “divisive” and “polarizing” were among the most common media descriptions at the time — a legacy of Ratzinger’s 23-year tenure as head of the church’s top doctrinal body, where his duties included disciplining wayward theologians.

Yet over the course of the past four years, the man once known as “God’s Rotweiller” has surprised progressive critics and conservative fans alike with the mildness of his papal style.

“Benedict hasn’t appointed a swath of arch-conservatives to key posts,” said John L. Allen, Jr., senior correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter and a papal biographer. “He hasn’t been the disciplinarian that some people expected.”

Indeed, in the American church, some of his most prominent appointments — Archbishops Donald Wuerl to Washington and Timothy Dolan to New York, for example — have been traditionalists in substance but moderates in style.

While firmly upholding traditional church teachings on such controversial questions as homosexuality and Christ’s unique role as savior of humanity, Benedict has also emerged as a vigorous critic of modern capitalism and a greenish proponent of environmental protection — positions usually associated with the Catholic left.

Yet one of Benedict’s main projects has been an effort to reconcile the church with traditionalist believers disaffected by the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).

Unlike theologians who emphasize Vatican II’s many breaks with tradition, Benedict has described the council as an instance of “innovation in continuity,” in which the church adapted to changed historical circumstances while preserving its eternal truths.

In a nod toward continuity, Benedict lifted restrictions on the so-called Old Latin Mass, which had fallen out of favor after Vatican II. That decision, which has yet to affect the majority of priests or lay Catholics, has proven relatively uncontroversial.

“In liturgy he is a genuine pluralist,” said Tracey Rowland, dean of the John Paul II Institute in Melbourne, Australia, and author of “Ratzinger’s Faith.” “He does not see a problem with there being more than one rite.”

But Benedict’s next major gesture toward reconciliation with ultra-traditionalists — lifting the 20-year-old excommunications of four bishops in the schismatic Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) — provoked an international furor.

Jewish groups were outraged after one of the bishops, Richard Williamson, told Swedish television that at most 300,000 Jews “perished in Nazi concentration camps … not one of them by gassing in a gas chamber.”

The Vatican insisted that Benedict had not known about Williamson’s well-documented record of inflammatory statements, and the pope himself later acknowledged a number of “mishaps,” including a failure of Vatican officials to consult the Internet.

That misunderstanding recalled the events of September 2006, when the pope angered Muslims with a speech that quoted a medieval description of Islam as “evil and inhuman” and “spread by the sword.” After violent protests against the speech in several Islamic countries, Benedict expressed his “regrets,” and later held a number of high-profile meetings with Muslim leaders.

The latest major distraction came last month, after the pope told reporters accompanying him to Africa that the distribution of condoms aggravates the spread of HIV/AIDS. The comment led to controversy that overshadowed press coverage of his week-long trip to Cameroon and Angola.

Benedict has shown, however, that he can be an effective communicator, even by comparison with his charismatic and telegenic predecessor.

“He’s a much clearer writer and preacher than John Paul,” said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a fellow at the Woodstock Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., and author of “Inside the Vatican.” “John Paul’s syntax could be so convoluted, it was often very difficult to follow his thinking.”

The pope’s 2007 best-seller, “Jesus of Nazareth,” is “pitched at a level that any literate person can follow,” Rowland said, concluding that “it is good that he is giving priority to his writing over baby-kissing opportunities.”

And Benedict’s April 2008 visit to the United States, which earned him 86-percent approval ratings from U.S. Catholics, demonstrated that the cerebral pontiff can also draw and charm large crowds.

The pope’s public relations troubles evidently reflect not a deficiency of sophisticated communications skills, but a lack of experience with the cruder calculations of media strategy.

“He needs to be surrounded by people adept in translating him to the wider world,” Allen said.

Benedict’s failure to seek such counsel, like his failure to enact a long-awaited reform of the Vatican bureaucracy, reflects a limitation that Benedict apparently recognizes in himself.

As Reese recalled then-Cardinal Ratzinger telling him more than a decade and a half ago: “‘Management is not my charism.'”