The Pope has “more than nine million followers and
thanks to re-tweeting Francis has reached at least 60,000,000 people
via smartphones and tablets”; this is on top of the “10,260,000 people
who visit the various language versions of the www.news.va website via
Facebook.”The Pope’s popularity on social networks has reached record levels in the early months of his pontificate. Few international leaders can boast this level of media success, according to Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, President of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications.
The prelate spoke to Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano about this, ahead of the dicastery’s plenary assembly which ran from 19 to 21 September, concluding with a papal audience.
“We have decided to look into the link between “the web and the Church”,” Mgr. Celli explained in a statement about the assembly.
“In order to understand the reasons behind this choice, we need to cast our minds back to Benedict XVI’s final message for World Communications Day, in which he spoke at length about the web, casting it in a positive light and hoping that the Church will have a deeply evangelising presence on the web,” Mgr. Celli said.