Advertisment

Vatican discloses Pope Benedict's handle on Twitter

author-image
Supriya Rai
New Update

VATICAN CITY: It's official. Pope Benedict's handle on Twitter will be @pontifex. He already has 1.2 billion "followers" in the standard sense of the word but next week he will have another type when he enters what for any 85-year old is the brave new world of Twitter. The Vatican said on Monday that the pope will start tweeting on December 12, the feast of the Madonna of Guadalupe.

Advertisment

"The handle is a good one. It means 'pope' and it also means 'bridge builder'," said Greg Burke, senior media advisor to the Vatican. "The pope wants to reach out to everyone," he told a news conference. The first papal tweets will be answers to questions sent to #askpontifex.

The tweets will be going out in Spanish, English, Italian, Portuguese, German, Polish, Arabic and French. Other languages will be added in the future. "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," Burke said.

Primarily the tweets will come from the contents of his weekly general audience, Sunday blessings and homilies on major Church holidays. They will also include reaction to major world events, such as natural disasters. Benedict will be sending his first tweet himself on December 12 but in the future most will be written by aides and he will sign off on them before they are sent in his name.

Advertisment

But while the pope will be one of the world's most high-profile tweeters and have many followers, he will not be following anyone himself. The pope's Twitter page is designed in yellow and white - the colors of the Vatican, with a backdrop of the Vatican and his picture. It may change during different liturgical seasons of the year and when the pope is away from the Vatican on trips.

The pope, who still writes his speeches and books by hand, has given a qualified blessing to social networking. In a document issued last year, he said the possibilities of new media and social networks offered "a great opportunity", but warned of the risks of depersonalization, alienation, self-indulgence, and the dangers of having more virtual friends than real ones.

In 2009, a new Vatican website, www.pope2you.net, went live, offering an application called "The pope meets you on Facebook", and another allowing the faithful to see the pontiff's speeches and messages on their iPhones or iPods. The Vatican famously got egg on its face in 2009 when it was forced to admit that, if it had surfed the web more, it might have known that a traditionalist bishop whose excommunication was lifted had for years been a Holocaust denier.

tech-news