The Pope has now officially got his own Twitter account, using @pontifex, the Vatican has confirmed.
A spokesperson said that it would allow Pope Benedict XVI to “reach out to everyone”. At the time of writing though, (December 6th 2012), no tweets had been sent, with the first expected to come tomorrow, Wednesday 12th.
As part of his audience given every Wednesday, the Pope is expected to host a Q&A session on faith – answering each poser in no more than 140 characters
The account was launched on Monday December 3rd, and is available in eight languages. The main English language account has well over half a million followers already.
The other accounts see German (@pontifex_de) having 13,500 followers, Spanish, (_es) on 117,000, Portuguese (_pt) with 20,000, Polish (_pl) 6,000, Italian (_it) 59,000, French (_fr) 11,500 and Arabic (_ar) with 5,000.
Each account is only following each other.
The Vatican has had its own account for a while now however, the latest accounts are said to be all about his papalness’ exclusively.
The senior media advisor for the holy state, Greg Burke 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.”
It is believed that he will not actually write or send the tweets himself though. However, it is thought each tweet will be signed off by the Pontiff.
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