Pope Benedict XVI to open his own Twitter account

9 Nov 2012

Pope Benedict XVI will open a personal Twitter account and will possibly begin tweeting before the end of the year.

Vatican spokesman the Rev Federico Lombardi said details about the pontiff’s handle and other information will come when the Vatican officially launches the account, The Washington Post reported.

The Pope is no stranger to Twitter, however, as he sent his first tweet last year when he launched the Vatican’s news information Twitter account, and this year he tweeted a message a day for the 40 days of Lent.

The new Twitter account will be the Pope’s own, though, and it will likely work via him signing off on any tweets posted on his behalf.

The Washington Post article said Benedict writes longhand and doesn’t normally use a computer.

The Pope’s tweets may be be “fairly infrequent” but when he doesn take to the microblogging site, his tweets will probably “not veer too far from his texts, and on many occasions point to the things the Pope says,” Newsmax reported an official as having said.

Tina Costanza was a journalist and sub-editor at Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com