MANILA, Dec. 10, 2012 – Even sans a single tweet, the Holy Father Pope Benedict’s potential tweeting celebrity is huge, especially among the media savvy young Pinoy Catholics, who are eager to follow @Pontifex’s tweets.
The Holy Father will only start tweeting on December 12, the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, but young tweeters like Melissa Lara, 20, a Regnum Christi member, are already ‘excited’ to see what will appear on the @Pontifex Twitter feed.
Lara, who likes broadcasting her own thoughts through social media, said, she would love to see the Pope tweet about “inspiring messages and anything that will help me grow more in faith.”
Jan Michael Tupas, 19, sector head for a CFC – Youth for Christ highschool-based program, said he is looking forward to the Holy Father’s tweets on “his stand on issues and daily reflections.”
Tupas said the Pope’s 140 characters would definitely give readers “more profound ideas.”
For Joy Reyes, a tweeting Pope is a concrete sign of reaching out to the public and “keeping up with the times,” much like John Paul II’s many efforts to be on television during his reign.
Reyes, an Ateneo de Manila student, said she hopes the Pope will tweet links to his encyclicals.
In general, young people believe the Pope invading Twitterverse makes him “more accessible.”
As of this writing, the Pope’s official Twitter account has 597, 846 followers.
Tweets will be translated to eight different languages to cater to the multi-national face of some 1.1 billion-strong Catholics in the world. [Nirva’ana Ella Delacruz]
