VATICAN CITY — The Vatican has brought in the Fox News cor­respondent in Rome to help im­prove its communications strategy as it tries to cope with years of communications blunders and one of its most serious scandals in decades, officials said Saturday.

Greg Burke, 52, will leave Fox to become the senior communi­cations adviser in the Vatican’s secretariat of state, the Vatican and Burke told The Associated Press.

“I’m a bit nervous but very excited. Let’s just say it’s a chal­lenge," Burke said.

He defined his job, which he said he had been offered twice before, as being along the lines of the White House senior commu­nications adviser: “You’re shaping the message, you’re moulding the message, and you’re trying to make sure everyone remains on-message. And that’s tough."

Burke, a native of St. Louis, Mo., is a member of the conser­vative Opus Dei movement. Pope John Paul II’s longtime spokes­man, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, was also a member of Opus Dei and was known for the papal access he enjoyed and his ability to craft the messages John Paul wanted to get out.

After Pope Benedict was elected in 2005, Navarro-Valls was re­placed by the Rev. Federico Lom­bardi, a Jesuit who had long headed Vatican Radio and still does, along with running the Vatican press office and Vatican television service.

Lombardi told the AP that Burke will help integrate commu­nications issues within the Vatic­an’s top administrative office, the secretariat of state, and will help handle its relations with the Holy See press office and other Vatican communications offices. Burke will report to the Vatican under­secretary of state and the official who oversees Vatican communi­cations in the secretariat.

Lombardi confirmed the news after the AP broke the story, sever­al days before the Holy See had planned to announce it officially.

The Vatican has been bedeviled by communications blunders ever since Benedict’s 2005 election, and is currently dealing with a scandal over Vatican documents that were leaked to Italian jour­nalists. While the scandal is serious — Benedict himself con­vened a special meeting of cardin­als Saturday to try to cope with it — the Vatican’s communications problems long predate it.

Benedict’s now-infamous speech about Muslims and vio­lence, his 2009 decision to reha­bilitate a schismatic bishop who denied the Holocaust, and the Vatican’s response to the 2010 explosion of the sex abuse scandal are just a few of the blunders that have tarnished Benedict’s papacy.

Even the Vatican’s response to the leaks from within the Vatican of sensitive papal documents hasn’t involved a terribly so­phisticated public relations strate­gy.

Just last week the Vatican No. 2, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, blamed the media and the devil for fueling the scandal and ac­cused journalists of “pretending to be Dan Brown."

Brown wrote “The Da Vinci Code," the bestselling fictional account that portrayed Opus Dei — of which Bertone’s new com­munications adviser is a member — as being at the root of an inter­national Catholic conspiracy.