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Pope Francis ascends to the @Pontifex pulpit

It won’t take much to top Pope Benedict’s short run as the Internet's first father of Catholicism.

 

Chase Hoffberger

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Posted on Mar 18, 2013   Updated on Jun 1, 2021, 9:23 pm CDT

Holy smokes! Chief @Pontifex is #back! Everybody get out your smartphones and cellular devices. It’s time to get #religious.

Last week’s news that Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio would become Pope Francis meant that the secular world finally had someone equipped with a strong enough résumé (work experience: pope!) to bestow upon them the God-like Twitter account of @Pontifex, the official Twitter handle of the papacy and one of the most sorely underused accounts on the Web.

No telling how exactly Pope Francis plans to utilize the account—which has more than 2 million followers and eight different affiliate accounts tweeting in French, Spanish, Dutch, German, Polish, Arabic, Italian, and Portuguese—but it won’t take much to top Pope Benedict’s short run as the Internet’s first father of Catholicism.

The Pope has already sent out one tweet, however. His first message, posted Sunday morning at 6:17am, presumably just before church, received more than 31,000 retweets.

Here’s hoping he gets into Weird Twitter quite soon!

Photo via Pope Francis/Facebook

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*First Published: Mar 18, 2013, 4:31 pm CDT