Pope passes 2 million followers on Twitter

December 17, 2012 - Five days since Pope Benedict XVI’s first Tweet on Dec. 12 in eight languages, his Twitter username has over two million followers. The latest tally of the Pope’s @Pontifex handle was provided by the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Social Communications. President of the Council, Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli told Vatican Radio the Pope is tweeting because that’s what people are doing today and he wants to be present in the latest platforms of communication to share with them “words of truth.” That means adapting his messages to fit into Twitter’s 140 character format. But the key, Archbishop Celli notes, “is not so much the number of characters available but the depth of the words he uses.” Archbishop Celli pointed out that 140 million people actively use Twitter and forty percent of them are young people from 18 to 34 years of age. And Pope Benedict wants to be there in the dialogue with them, he said. The Pope and the Church, the archbishop said, want to be where men and women are speaking together because not only are they sharing information, they’re also sharing a bit of themselves. Archbishop Celli also said that the Church must do all it can to bridge the “digital divide” in Africa and certain areas of Latin America and Asia where access to social media is greatly limited.