“DEAR FOLLOWERS, I understand that there are now over ten million of you! I thank you with all my heart and ask you to continue praying for me.”
These words were written by the Holy Father on 10 October last year when the PONTIFEX twitter account, which can be read in nine different languages, reached the threshold of 10 million followers.
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service, first launched in July 2006, that has rapidly gained worldwide popularity and which has now garnered over 500 million registered users.
The PONTIFEX twitter account, instituted at Pope Benedict’s urging, was inaugurated on 12 December 2012 in eight languages, with Latin added a month later. The initiative was an immediate success, and by 28 February 2013, the last day of Pope Benedict’s pontificate, it had already gained 3 million followers.
During the interim period PONTIFEX was put on hold, but was reactivated on17 March, five days after the election of Pope Francis. From that moment on, the account has gone from strength to strength. Currently the language most clicked is Spanish (over 4 million aficionados), with English coming in second (over 3,130,000 followers).
With Twitter, however, one must also take into account the even greater multitude of followers collected through the phenomenon of ‘re-tweeting’. In other words, besides the current 10 million users, an even greater number of people are receiving the Holy Father’s tweets because these 10 million followers are forwarding the Pope’s messages to those friends of theirs who are not yet registered with PONTIFEX.
Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, President of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, has given a conservative estimate of the overall number of people involved, “Sixty million people receive the Pope’s tweets, which are like a spiritual shower of hope.”
Pope Francis is therefore the most ‘re-tweeted’ public figure in the world today – a popularity of rock-star levels. Last July, the Holy Father was named “the most influential world leader on Twitter,” according to a global communication report by Switzerland-based public relations and communication firm Burson-Marsteller. The American business magazine Forbes has placed Pope Francis as the fourth most powerful person in the world, behind Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Barack Obama, and Chinese President Xi Jinping; and last December Time magazine named Pope Francis Person of the Year 2013.
Our current pontiff is loved so much because he is able to touch the hearts of believers and non-believers alike with his sincere, direct approach, and by his sensitivity and warmth. There is a great deal of loneliness and suffering in the world, and people are in dire need of direct human warmth and contact rather than lofty sermons or great theological treatises. Pope Francis knows this and has established a direct connection with people: he is not afraid to reach out to the faithful, and allow them to reach out to him. He even phones ordinary men and women at times, and stops to talk with them about their personal problems: the Pope emanates credibility through the coherence of his example.
I have heard people ask, “But is it really Pope Francis who writes all the tweets?” From what I was able to gather, Pope Francis is aided by a special Office of the Secretariat of State. This Office chooses which sentences and sayings of the Pope could become tweets, and these short phrases are then submitted to Pope Francis for his approval. It is only when the Holy Father has endorsed them that they are translated and posted on PONTIFEX.
During the recent visit of the relics of St. Anthony to the USA, Ireland and the UK, I was asked quite a number of times if we had a Twitter or Facebook account, and I was forced to admit that we had not yet considered this option.
Dear readers, I am now very happy to announce that, thanks to your insistence, and, above all, to the Holy Father’s example (who tries to use all the technology at his disposal to connect with people), we are opening our own Twitter account as of this month, February 2014.
Let us come closer in communion: a tweet and we’ll be in touch. So, dear readers, follow us! Go to: Twitter.com/FriarMario.
Updated on October 06 2016