Pope Benedict XVI plants to tweet in Latin, Vatican spokesmen have announced, resurrecting the dead language in a postmodern medium starting Sunday.
"Twitter is a tool which requires rapid communication," Roberto Spataro, secretary of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Latin Studies, told the Guardian U.K. "In English you say 'the corruption of the best one is horrible.’ In Latin, three words suffice: 'corrupt optima pessima.’’’
Scroll For The Pope's Non-Latin Tweets
But if character conservation is one of the goals, it doesn't always work. For example, "I can has cheeseburger?" becomes "Possum habere cheeseburger?" Not that the Pope would ever tweet anything so plebeian. (LOL!)
Pope Benedict XVI started tweeting from his official account, @Pontifex (that's Latin, too), in December. The account has more than 1.4 million followers, as of press time.
Reuters reported on Dec. 20, the Pope had bested pop music icon Justin Bieber in Twitter retweets:
[T]he Vatican newspaper said... about 50 percent of the pope's followers had re-tweeted his first tweet on December 12 while only 0.7 percent of Bieber's followers had re-tweeted one of the singer's most popular tweets on September 26, when he commented on the death by cancer of a six-year-old fan.
Since last month, the pontiff has been tweeting in English, French, German, Italian, Arabic, Polish and Portuguese. He soon will add Chinese to the mix, according to Newsmax.
Other religious leaders have taken to Twitter to share their reflections on faith. The official Twitter account of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, for example, has more than 6 million followers.