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.