Ever think you'd see a sentence with 'The Pope Twitter' in it? We didn't. But there you have it, The Pope has joined the social media craze that is Twitter, and we can't wait for some lovely tweets from @pontifex - a term for the pope that means "bridge builder" in Latin. 

Within hours, he had more than 250,000 followers, The New York Times reports. "The pope's presence on Twitter can be seen as the 'tip of the iceberg' that is the church's presence in the world of new media," the Vatican said in a statement. The idea behind joining up one of the oldest institutions in the world, with one of the newest, is to connect further to the Roman Catholic Church's 1.2 billion followers, especially young people, they say. Greg Burke, a former Fox News correspondent in Rome who was named a Vatican communications adviser this year, said at a news conference. "He won't follow anyone for now," Mr. Burke added. "He will be followed." 

So don't expect an email saying "@pontifex is now following you!" and if you thought Popey would be scribing his holy tweets himself, you're deluded; he'll have aides to do that for him, but we've been assured that he'll be approving all 140 characters. "The pope is not the kind of person like the rest of us who in a meeting or a lunch is looking at their BlackBerrys to see if any messages have come in," Mr. Burke added. "He is not walking around with an iPad, but all the pope's tweets are the pope's words."