The Pope gets tweeting, but don’t expect any fancy food pics

So the Pope sends out a tweet…no it’s not the start of a joke. It’s what’s going to happen come 12 December.

The Vatican today announced that Pope Benedict will start tweeting a few days from now, using the handle @pontifex.

The handle is a good one. It means ‘pope’ and it also means ‘bridge builder’,” said Greg Burke, senior media advisor to the Vatican.

“The pope wants to reach out to everyone,” he added. That, along with the Catholic church’s diverse membership might go some way to explaining why the handle will tweet out Spanish, English, Italian, Portuguese, German, Polish, Arabic and French.

“We are going to get a spiritual message. The pope is not going to be walking around with a Blackberry or an iPad and no one is going to be putting words into the pope’s mouth. He will tweet what he wants to tweet,” Burke said.

So in other words we shouldn’t expect his holiness to tweet pictures of his dinner, or a description of how cool the light looks through the Popemobile as he travels through an adoring crowd.

Instead the content will largely be drawn from the pontiff’s weekly general audience, Sunday blessings and homilies on major Church holidays. There will also reportedly be reaction to major world events.

While the Pope won’t be typing out the tweets himself (teaching an octogenarian would be an interesting exercise), he will okay them before they go out.

Image: Wikipedia