The Pope gets Twitter account

by Edwin - on December 4th, 2012

So here are millions and millions of folks out there who already own a Twitter account, with some stalkers having more than just one. Well, one of the world’s most revered spiritual leaders, the Pope, has finally jumped aboard the Twitter bandwagon officially, where he is now able to send Twitter messages to the Catholic faithful via the handle @pontifex, which is actually his personal account, at least according to the Vatican. According to a spokesman, Pope Benedict XVI intended to “reach out to everyone” with tweets â€" and in order to achieve the maximum exposure, whatever the man of God tweets will be translated into eight languages.

It is said that if you want to know just what the Pope’s first tweet is all about from the @pontifex account, then wait for December 12th to know more. @pontifex means “pontiff” as well as “builder of bridges”, and both of them are very apt for a man of the Pope’s stature. Of course, this December 12th would not be the first tweet from the Pope, as he already sent his first tweet in 2011 (albeit using a Vatican account) in order to roll out the Holy See’s news information portal.

Greg Burke, senior media advisor to the Vatican, said, “We are going to get a spiritual message. The Pope is not going to be walking around with a Blackberry or an iPad and no-one is going to be putting words into the Pope’s mouth. He will tweet what he wants to tweet.”

According to the Vatican, the Pope will rely on a question-and-answer format for his first Twitter session, where he will focus mainly on answering questions concerning the faith, limited by just 140 characters tops for each reply.

In fact, the Vatican has already begun to invite folks to start sending in questions ahead of time so that the Pope will have enough time to formulate his answer when the time comes. Will the Pope overtake Justin Bieber in terms of Twitter followers eventually?

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