The Pope Is Now on Twitter (in Eight Languages)

It’s official: The Pope is now on Twitter.

@Pontifex, as well as seven other variations of that handle that sport different language tags (Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Polish, Arabic and French) are now active on the site. Although the pope has yet to tweet, he already has over 100,000 followers. That first tweet will take place on December 12th, according to Vatican officials.

What can you expect from the pope? Well, probably not Instagram photos or #FF suggestions. Apparently the pope will keep the account strictly business, tweeting on “spiritual” matters.

But Vatican officials are adamant that the pope’s Twitter account will be operated by the pope himself. There will be no ghost tweeter at work. “All the pops’s tweets are the pope’s words. Nobody is going to be putting words into his mouth,” said a Vatican media advisor. Benedict will be tweeting when and what he wants.

In reality, that means that most of the content being sent out via the Twitter account will come from the pope’s masses and other weekly affirmations. It’s unlikely that the pope will get so into it that he becomes attached to an iPhone with the Twitter app, so his aides will most likely take over the manual tweeting labor.

Although this is the first time the pope has created his own Twitter account, this isn’t his first run-in with Twitter. Last summer, Pope Benedict tweeted for the first time, sending out a dispatch from the official Vatican News account. He used the first tweet to announce his new blog and to give praise to Jesus Christ, naturally.

Here’s Benedict tweeting for the first time from an iPad. Here’s to hoping he’s gotten a little more familiar with the technology over the past year: