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Pope Benedict XVI Joseph Ratzinger sends out his first tweet.
Pope Benedict XVI now has his own personal Twitter account. Despite racking up tens of thousands of followers in only a short time, however, the pontiff has yet to pontificate in 140 characters.
The ranks of Twitter users just got a whole lot holier. Pope Benedict XVI has officially joined the microblogging service under the handle @Pontifex. In fact, he joined it eight times – once each for issuing divine tweets in English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Italian, French and Arabic. The Pope has already racked up more than 70,000 followers at the time of this writing – roughly 0.004 percent of the world’s Catholic population. That number will surely jump many time higher in the coming hours and days.
So far, Pope Benedict XVI has issued no tweets himself. That is likely to change soon, however, considering the Pope is an old hat at Twitter. Last year, the pontiff sent out his first-ever tweet from an Apple iPad to commemorate the launch of News.va, the Vatican’s online media hub.
“Dear Friends, I just launched www.news.va. Praised be our Lord Jesus Christ! With my prayers and blessings, Benedictus XVI,” reads Pope Benedict XVI’s first tweet.
News.va, as well as the Vatican’s YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Flickr photo feed, are run by the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Social Communication.The Council was established all the way back in 1948 with the declaration that the Church sees “the media as an outcome of the historical scientific process by which humankind ‘advances further and further in the discovery of the resources and values contained in the whole of creation.’”
The adoption of social media by religious leaders is, of course, nothing new. Most notable among them is the Dalai Lama, who has amassed more than 5.6 million followers and tweets about once or twice a week, on average.
In addition to his social media presence, Pope Benedict XVI also became the first pontiff to adopt green car technology with a new Popemobile based on a the all-electric Renault Kangoo Maxi ZE. The gas-free Popemobile will serve as Benedict XVI’s mode of transportation around his summer home in Castel Gandolfo, Italy, which is roughly five square miles in area – a good size for a car that can travel 105 miles on a single charge.
Original news taken from: Digitaltrends ,Spanish: Google Translate
