President of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, Claudio Maria Celli announced on 4th Dec 2012 that Pope Benedict would join twitter at the twitter address @pontifex. The move was motivated by desire of Pope to encounter men and women where ever they are, and begin a dialogue with them.
The first tweet was published on 12th Dec 2012, around 10.30am as announced earlier @pontifex and seven other associated accounts in different languages. At the time of first tweet the Pope accounts had a million followers. The name of the account means "bridge-builder" as well as "pontiff" in Latin. The accounts followed only sever other papal accounts. Each of them would tweet the same message, at the same moment, in languages including Polish, Portuguese and Arabic.
His message read in English: "Dear friends, I am pleased to get in touch with you through Twitter. Thank you for your generous response. I bless all of you from my heart." Within hours the message had been re tweeted more than 30,000 times, with more than 10,000 other users marking it as one of their favourites. Many responded in the spirit intended. "Dear holy father, we live in secular countries, please keep us in your prayers!" replied the Catholic youth movement World Youth Day. About an hour after the first came the second papal tweet. "How can we celebrate the Year of Faith better in our daily lives?" Then @pontifex answered his own question. "By speaking with Jesus in prayer, listening to what he tells you in the gospel and looking for him in those in need." Further questions and responses followed, selected from among the many thousands tweeted to the accounts in previous days.
According to Vatican, the 85 year old pontiff had been personally very keen to get himsefl a twitter account. The microblogging site was keen to have a papal account. The company has a department dedicated to extending its brand among celebrity and influential figures, and reportedly employs around 20 staff solely to recruit high profile tweeters. Twitter's head of social innovation, Claire Diaz-Ortiz, had travelled to Rome to prepare the Vatican team for the big moment; after Benedict's inaugural message she tweeted on her own feed @claire: "The Pope is on Twitter. #done"
Vatican will have people to manage papal tweet accounts. Subsequent tweets will be written by others they will be approved by the Pope, according to Vatican spokesman - "not physically, but from his mind".
The tweet and the hype around it would be used by the Church to promote proselytizing of the non christian world. The name and the tone of the initial messages clearly indicates this intent.
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