Pope's Twitter account expected to top one million followers

(Vatican Radio) He may not have caught up with the Dalai Lama, Barack Obama or Justin Bieber quite yet, but Pope Benedict’s new Twitter feed is expected to hit the one million followers mark by Christmas. That’s according to the president of the Pontifical council for Social Communications which, together with Vatican Radio, has been spearheading the Holy See’s foray into new communications technologies….Vatican Radio’s Philippa Hitchen reports:

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Archbishop Claudio Celli told me the numbers of Twitter followers topped 700.000 on Thursday morning, just three days after the Holy Father’s handle @pontifex was announced to the press. The first tweets will be sent by the Pope himself at the Wednesday general audience on December 12^th in response to a number of questions he’s received. But Archbishop Celli says it’s less about topping the popularity charts and more about providing a word of faith and hope in the virtual world where men and women of today are increasingly spending most of their time….

"The Holy Father is not looking for popularity – this doesn’t correspond to a pope and it doesn’t correspond to the style of Pope Benedict XVI.
I think he is choosing a way to be present where people are….with a tweet, we don’t resolve the problems of the Church, but I think our duty is to be present. The peculiarity of the new technologies is to create an environment where people are living and in such a milieu we have to announce the Gospel, to announce Jesus – we have to be there!"

Unsurprisingly, English is the language in which most people have so far chosen to follow the Pope, with Spanish, German, Polish and Portuguese coming close behind and over five thousand Arabic followers also signed up. Not all the tweets are positive, Archbishop Celli admits, in fact some are negative, some are funny, some are down right rude and offensive. And the Pope has also been criticised for joining the social media site where he won’t be following anyone else or engaging in the kind of interactive communication for which Twitter was designed. Archbishop Celli again:

"Can you imagine if the 700.000 followers are starting to send tweets to the Holy Father – how is it possible to give answers? So certainly it’s contradicting the interactivity of this way of communicating, but it is a practical way. For me what is important is that the light of the Holy Father, his presence is there and I hope that his followers can re-tweet the messages in order that we can reach all the corners of the world…….like a man who is crossing the desert and needs some drops of water to refresh (him) and I think a tweet of the Holy Father can be such a spark of light, a pearl of wisdom, a drop of fresh water to rediscover the real meaning of Jesus"