In recent years, the Holy See (the administrative body of the Catholic Church consisting
of the Pope and various executive departments of Vatican) has built its social
media presence across some of the social media platforms. Campbell and Vitullo
(2019) have described three latest papacies as ’John Paul II – the texting Pope, Benedict
– the tweeting Pope and Francis as the selfie Pope’, according to their presence
and use as well as their approach towards various media.
Pope Benedict XVI was ushered into the world of social media creating a new
space for evangelization and papal communication and has published his first short
message, a ‘tweet’, with the hashtag #askpontifex on 12 th December of 2012.
“Dear friends, I am pleased to get in touch with you through Twitter.
Thank you for your generous response. I bless all of you from my heart”
(Twitter, 2012).
This account of Benedict XVI @Pontifex, a Latin word, meaning bridge builder was
created on December 3, 2012 (Gazda and Kulla, 2013). Archbishop Claudio Celli, the
president of the PCSC, stated on this:
“Twitter allows a new type of evangelism. Which means the Pope can
reach a new demographic and engage in a dialogue with the faithful”
(Havlicek, 2018).
The present Pope Francis has inherited this twitter account of his predecessor and
@Pontifex became the first account which became inherited by someone (Gazda and
Kulla, 2013). His first tweet was on March 17, 2013, four days after his election:
“Dear friends, I thank you from my heart and I ask you to continue to
pray for me. Pope Francis” (Twitter, 2013).
As of June 2020, the Pope’s twitter account have gained 51.2 million twitter followers
as the total of its nine language accounts and he is the third highest world leader
with the most Twitter followers (Statista, 2020i). The current state of followers of
these twitter accounts of the Pope is given in Table 2.1. About 45.8 million twitter
users were joined as new followers of the Pope, during the last eight years, which
corresponds to an average increase of 5.7 million new followers per year compared
to the followers as on May 21, 2013 (Gazda and Kulla, 2013). Among the nine language
mutations of the @Pontifex twitter account, English and Spanish languages
have the most number of followers, both of them having more than 18 million followers.
All these social media accounts are not directly managed by Pope himself.
It is handled by the Vatican’s communication department, which is responsible for
the all official communication of the Church, before publishing with the approval by the Pope.
In addition to this ‘papal’ twitter account, Vatican’s Communication department
also provides the official communication channels on the social network for the Holy
See. The following are some the activities of those highest representatives and central
institutions of the Catholic Church on the Internet, especially social media.
- The Holy See entered the world of the Internet on December 25, 1995, when it
was published the Christmas message of John Paul II, his greetings in different
languages and his blessing Urbi et Orbi on www.vatican.va. Within the first 48
hours 307,786 users from 70 countries visited the webpage (Gazda and Kulla,
2013). - The Holy See has its own account on the video sharing service You Tube www.
youtube.com/vatican since January 2009. Pope’s Easter message and
blessing Urbi et Orbi in 2009 was launched in 27 languages including Arabic,
Japanese, Esperanto, Tamil, etc. It was not dubbing of his message, only captions,
but it still made record, as never in the history of You Tube was a video
launched in so many languages (Gazda and Kulla, 2013). - The Holy See has been present on Twitter since March 20, 2010. Vatican Radio
launched the account @news_va in six language mutations and published
the first tweet on the Pastoral Letter of the Holy Father Benedict XVI to the
Catholics of Ireland which covered sexual scandals of clergy in Ireland. On
June 28, 2012 on Twitter there appeared the account of news webpage News.va
under the name @newsva in English and Italian. The first tweet informing on
launching of new news service was published by Pope personally:
“Dear friends, I just launched News.va. Praised be our Lord Jesus Christ! With my prayers and blessings, Benedictus XVI” (Twitter, 2011).
It was for the first time in history when Pope joined communication on social
media (Gazda and Kulla, 2013).
• Besides the Vatican Radio, Pontifical Council for the Family, Pontifical Council
for Culture, Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization
and Pontifical Council for Social Communications are connected with social
media. Each of these councils manages its own Twitter and Facebook profiles
and some of them use also YouTube and Flickr (Gazda and Kulla, 2013).