“Do you follow Pope Francis on Twitter?”

Yes, you read the obscure title correctly. That is the questionable text message I received recently from my mother. Not a, “how are classes going?” or “where are you doing your laundry this weekend?” kind of text message that most college students would get from their mother, but rather a casual text of a mother asking her college student if they follow the Pope on a social networking site. No big deal.
After receiving this message, I logged in to my twitter account and did some researching about what a Pope during this day in age could be tweeting about in 140 characters or less. I then felt slightly guilty about not following him, so I clicked the little gray box and exhaled a sigh of relief.
My findings were quite interesting. Pope Francis currently has 3.5M followers and follows his other eight accounts in Arabic, French, Italian, and other languages. The 3.5M number is quite low compared to Katy Perry, the “I kissed a girl” singer and tweeter with the most followers at 49.4M. Pope Francis also is a little behind compared to the Dalai Lama’s 8.2M followers count.
Pope Francis tweets once a day, giving his followers a daily reminder about God’s blessings and sending prayer intentions for others. His tweets give us something spiritual to think about, rather than nonsense tweets we may be scrolling past, such as Beyonce’s new haircut.
My mother’s random text message made me realize that Pope Francis is also adapting to the technologies of today. Is this a good thing? So far, I believe it is a step in a positive direction for the Catholic Church. I have enjoyed re-tweeting his thoughts for my followers to read. But now I am questioning myself and thinking, could this potentially be a bad thing? Tell me your thoughts.

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