Have you checked the Pope's Twitter account?
It's in the name of Benedict XIV!
Everyone and his grandmother knows by now that the "the Pope will be tweeting" daily during the 40 days of Lent, a piece of news that I chose to kick down the road from yesterday (but cannot completely ignore, obviously) - first, because I am probably the only benighted person in the world who cannot appreciate the value of social networking, and second, because the organizers of WYD-Sydney in 2008 and before them, the bishops of Austria, had used e-mail and texting to feed daily messages 'from the Pope' to interested parties. But since it's obviously a pandemic that even the Vatican has decided to avail of intensively - and the Pope himself comments about their uses - then by all means...
Now, the third and most important reason I am not raising any paeans yet to this venture. Because I generally like to make a basic fact check before commenting on anything, let me tell you what a shock it is to find out that whoever is handling the Pope's Twitter account can't even get his Pope right!:
Which leads me to the obvious questions:
Who chooses the messages, do they clear them with the Pope, and who frames them to see that they fit into 140 characters? How can we be sure that whoever it is is not misrepresenting the Pope? If you can make a mistake such as not getting the Twitter account name right at all, how are we to trust anything else you send in the Pope's name? Just imagine all the possible disasters if a questionable or even outright blasphemous statement somehow got tweeted in the Pope's name!
Will post the actual news item announcing the Lenten tweets later, for the record. For Now, I just hope that in the time since I checked on the papal Twitter page a few minutes ago, the Vatican Webmaster will have noticed and corrected the error! (BTW, I acessed the account by searching "pope benedict's twitter account'. I'd never have found it if I had used the conventional twitter address form, @PopeBenedict
XVI!)
P.S. It gets worse... Apparently this account has been active since June 28, at least, going by the bottom entry - and all this time, even after their big announcement yesterday, no one has bothered to correct the account name. Unless the Vatican web-whizkids really meant all this in behalf of the Pope who lived in 1675-1758, who must be getting a kick from where he is up there, at getting all this strange transmissions from cyperspace....
And oh yes, it's the second day of Lent. Do we see any Lenten tweet yet???? Or is there a second Twitter account just for Lent that I have not yet been able to unearth, socialnetwork-klutz that I am!
Here's how Vatican Radio touted the Twitter feed as it trotted out the announcement yesterday:
Follow the Pope
on Twitter for Lent
February 22, 2012
Some like to give up a favourite food for Lent. Others choose to follow a bible study course. Or commit to helping those less fortunate than themselves. But in our increasingly secular societies, many young people no longer keep the Lenten season in any special way – that’s why the Pontifical Council for Social Communications has come up with a new idea to focus hearts and minds on the challenges contained in Pope Benedict’s Lenten message for 2012.
Starting on Ash Wednesday, themes from that papal message will be posted on Twitter each day during Lent and over the coming months other papal speeches and documents are likely to be tweeted in a similar way, hoping to attract the media-savvy generation and entice them to find out more...
But is it all just another technological gimmick that ‘dumbs down’ the message of the Church? Not at all, says Msgr Paul Tighe, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, “many of the key Gospel ideas are readily rendered in just 140 characters…..” in an interview with Philippa Hitchens:
MONS. TIGHE: “The idea was very simply to try and use Twitter to share with people the essence of the Pope’s message for Lent, so over the 40 days of Lent to tweet every day one of the ideas of this message…. doing it in a way so that people can re-tweet and already people we know from our meeting with bloggers last year are already re-tweeting…
The pope2you site had phenomenal success at the time of its launch… over 5 million hits in the first week or two of its operation….The level of interest was such that we’ve kept it going by focusing on the big themes in the life of the church – Christmas, Easter, World Youth Day….”
Fairly soon we’ll also be able to get the Pope’s Angelus and other speeches on Twitter?
Yes, I think a lot of attention is being given to the idea of seeing
Twitter as a channel that could allow for a more direct and immediate way of sharing the nucleus of the Pope’s thoughts on various occasions, so I don’t think it’ll be confined to Lent…
To those who say it’s dumbing down –no, this is entry level…to provoke people’s interest and to invite them then to follow the message and read the text…many of the key Gospel ideas are readily rendered in 140 characters – this is not the only way the Church speaks but it’s an avenue that is open to us and it’s pithy, succinct and it’s one I think that we’re quite good at…
Note that nowhere in the entire item is the Twitter address provided!
PPS: A worse thought just occurred to me. If, since June 28, 2011, no one has called the attention of the Vatican web-wizards to their egregious mistake, does that mean no one has been following the account at all? And where were the whizkids themselves when they were setting up the subsequent Twit-feeds? No one bothered to look at the actual posts????
PPS#2: Serves me right for relying too much on Vatican Radio's English service as a primary source! The Twitter account in use for the Lenten messages is
twitter.com/#!/Pope2YouVatican:
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 24/02/2012 01:38]