After his success on Twitter, the Vatican announced that Pope Francis will be opening an Instagram account, where fans will be able to view photos and short videos from the Supreme Pontiff.
Holy Seat Communication Secretariat prefect Dario Viganó announced that the new channel would be named @Franciscus. Viganó added that although the account will be officially launched by the pope March 19 during the St. John celebration, to mark his three year anniversary as pope, the account is already active and contains two photos.
Currently, Jorge Mario Bergoglio has a total of almost 27.5 million followers on his nine different Twitter account, to which he posts in different languages, and has written a little over 700 messages.
His account in Spanish is the most followed, with 11.3 million followers, followed by his account in English (8.8 million), in Italian (3.4 million), Portuguese (two million), Polish (578,000), French (438,000), Latin (425,000), German (302,000) and Arabic (238,000).
Up until now, @Pontifex was the pope’s only official account. The Vatican has profiles on other social networks like YouTube and Facebook, but they are either institutional pages that do not belong to the Catholic leader or are false accounts.
TONY HARRISON