Pope takes to Twitter

Internet generation.
“The first tweets will be answers to questions sent to the pope on matters of faith. The public can start sending them starting now,” Vatican communications adviser Greg Burke said at a Press conference yesterday.

The account carries a picture of the pope waving and its number of followers rose from around 2 400 at the time of the announcement to over 24 000 just an hour later, with numbers continuing to rise sharply.
An introductory message of the account based in “Vatican City” read: “Welcome to the official Twitter page of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI.”

“Pontifex” is a Latin word meaning “pontiff”, the pope’s official title.
Benedict will only follow his own account in other languages for the moment and there are no plans for a Facebook account yet, Burke said, adding: “Twitter can be more effective than Facebook in passing on the Pope’s message.”

The tweets will be in Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish and more languages could be added in future. Several fake Twitter accounts already set up in the pope’s name have been used to mock the 85-year-old pontiff, but the Vatican said it was not worried about the risk that hostile messages would be tweeted on the real account. Burke, a former correspondent for US channel Fox News brought in by the Vatican in June to overhaul its public-relations operation, said the pope’s Twitter account would create “a free market of ideas, and that is good”.

It would serve up “pearls of wisdom coming from the heart of the pope”, he said, though the 140-character messages will not be written by the pope himself but by Vatican officials who will submit them to him for approval.

“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.” — AFP.