The Pope joins Twitter, gets 370,000 followers

24 hours ago Pope Benedict joined Twitter with the handle @pontifex and already his holiness has gained 370,000 followers. Among the first to welcome the pope to the social media site was Israeli President Shimon Peres, the 89 year old tweeted: “Your holiness, welcome to Twitter. Our relations with the Vatican are at their best & can form a basis to further peace everywhere.”

The pope has yet to send a single tweet but that isn’t stopping many of his 1.2 billion Roman Catholics from flocking to his site. According to the Vatican, Benedict will start tweeting officially on December 12^th and will stick predominantly to spiritual topics. The tweets will be available in Spanish, English, Portuguese, German, Polish, Italian, Arabic and French and after the official launch by the Pope on the 8^th, will mainly be written by aides. The first tweets will be reply’s to the questions currently being sent to #askpontifex.