The Pope (Image: Twitter.com)

The Catholic Church has had a pretty rough couple of years in terms of popularity. So the clergy must have been thrilled when the pope announced his arrival to Twitter earlier this month.

On December 12th, he tweeted his first message to the world, which sounds like an excerpt from a wily Aunt's last chain email, "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."

The Vatican is now bragging about the success of the first heavenly tweet and comparing il papa to Canada's own Holy Father, Justin Bieber.

The Vatican newspaper wrote in Thursday's paper that the pope's first tweet set a "percentage record for re-tweeting." Never heard of that record before, but let's just go with it. Congrats!

Reuters reported that  The Vatican newspaper said that, as of yesterday afternoon, the pope had 2.1 million followers. In actuality, his English speaking account only has 1.2 million and his Spanish speaking account is still hovering around 500,000. The others just don't add up to that reported number.

The Vatican also announced this week that the pope will add Latin and Chinese language accounts to the list of his Twitter personas. A Latin Twitter account? Because nothing says web 2.0 like tweeting exclusively in a dead language.

Can someone put Gary Vaynerchuk on a plane to Vatican City already?

The Pope, in the flesh. (Photo: flickr.com/Jess Pac)

Pope Benedict is due to start tweeting December 12, under the handle @pontifex. His Holiness has almost 375,000 followers already, and that number's still inching slowly northward.

But will those tweets be infallible? Are we going to get into some terrible theological muddle over a typo? Nope! The BBC says tweets don't qualify under the doctrine: 

"It's just like the Pope having a private conversation with someone," explains Archbishop Claudio Celli, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications.

He added, "There will be no dogmatic aspect to Papal tweets." That means no infallibility, which only applies when the pope is speaking as pope, not when he's giving you driving directions or retweeting rumors from the Roman police scanner. Future students of theology will therefore be spared the indignity of having to cite Twitter in their writings.

Personally, given Benedict's well-known flair for fashion, we're holding out for the official @pontifex Instagram account.