According to a statement issued by the Vatican on Monday, the Twitter account address for the Pope is @ Pontifex, and tweet messages will be sent in 8 different languages, and it was also informed that not only tweet messages will be sent out, but the Pope will also answer several questions weekly.

After announcing the address @ Pontifex, the English version account had 150,000 followers in a period of just six hours, not counting the thousands more in other languages, which a total of 1 billion followers are expected by the end of the year.

Last year the Pope issued his first tweet through a general account of the Vatican, and after seeing the response the Catholic Church then continued to seek ways to make their presence in social networks, which there is a lot of anticipation now for the 85 year old Pope to send his first tweet.

Although he will be in charge of his own account, others who close to the Pope will send messages, but each and every one of them will be approved first by the Pope.

You can already send questions with the hash tag #askpontifex, which 3-5 questions will be answered randomly, but many questions have been marked as spam because they are sarcastic or speak of the sex scandals that have engulfed the Church.

The "tweets" are sent simultaneously in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Arabic and Polish, and is expected to be also soon sent in Chinese.

The Vatican decided to use twitter as the ideal social network for the Pope, considering it would be a little less personal than Facebook, in an attempt by the Church to reach out to people, especially young people.

The Vatican also has a YouTube channel and Facebook that is used to invite the community to events, and remind them of important dates for the Church.

Joy.Ruvalcaba@sandiegored.com

Translation : Omar.Martinez@sandiegored.com