On year, two Popes, 215 archived Tweets, 10,778,852 followers at the time of my writing this. It’s been a year since Pope Benedict XVI tapped an iPad and sent the first papal tweet. It’s hard to argue that the presence of the Pope on Twitter has not been a success. If his followers were a country, it would be the 80th largest in the world, ranking between Greece and Portugal. They’d fill Vatican City about 13,500 times…
Of course, the Pope does not send his tweets as directly as we do. They are his own words, but the buttons are pushed by employees of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications. Msgr. Paul Tighe, secretary of that Council, recently explained how they had to find the best way of working with Twitter on behalf of the Pope. When Benedict XVI launched the accounts, a certain level of interactivity was proposed and experimented with, with followers asking questions using a specific hashtag, and the Holy Father answering a selection of those questions. Considering the huge amount of followers and the workload of sifting the honest and good questions from the jokes, ad hominems and attacks, this proved unworkable.
Today, the papal Twitter account functions mainly as a source of inspiration based on recent homilies and publications and, especially under Pope Francis, a constant string of commentary from the Holy Father on certain current affairs. A year from now, who knows what the numbers and nature of the Pope’s Twitter activity will be…
In Caelo et in Terra 
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