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| People taking photographs of Pope Francis with their phones in New York in September. Credit Eric Thayer/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
In the three years since Pope Francis joined Twitter,
he has attracted more than 25 million followers in nine languages. On
Saturday, the pontiff added a new app to his social media mix: The pope
joined Instagram.
When
most people join a new social media site, they find their first friends
and followers by scrolling through their email address books or
cellphone contact lists. But because this is Pope Francis, his arrival
on Instagram was heralded several days in advance by a Vatican news release.
“Instagram
will help recount the papacy through images, to enable all those who
wish to accompany and know more about Pope Francis’ pontificate to
encounter his gestures of tenderness and mercy,” Msgr. Dario E. Viganò,
prefect of the Vatican’s Secretariat for Communications, said in a statement.
The
pope, formerly known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now goes by the
Instagram name @Franciscus, which is Latin for “Francis.” According to Vatican Radio, the pontiff’s decision to join Instagram comes one month after he met with the company’s chief executive, Kevin Systrom.
His first picture
was uploaded at about 12:25 p.m. Saturday. It showed the pope in
prayer, and was accompanied by the words “Pray for me” in nine
languages.
Though
new traditions are slow in coming at an institution as old as the Roman
Catholic Church, it appears that a standard operating procedure for
social media has begun to emerge at the Vatican.
The
pope does not compose his own posts on Twitter, for instance, and he
likewise will not personally snap the photos that are uploaded to his
Instagram account. He won’t personally upload them, either.
That
will be the job of the social media department of the Secretariat for
Communications (yes, the Vatican has a social media department), which
will manage the account, choosing pictures from the photographic service
of L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s daily newspaper. “In
this way we can show those aspects of closeness and inclusion that Pope
Francis lives every day,” Monsignor Viganò said in the statement.
The pope’s Instagram account is separate from the official Vatican account,
which is run by the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, a
part of the Roman curia that also runs the Vatican’s official Twitter and Facebook accounts.
The
pontiff’s embrace of social media is in keeping with the
forward-looking aspects of his papacy, which have earned the 79-year-old
Aregentine the nickname “cool Pope” in certain quarters. He
has posed for selfies, taken up residence in a modest guesthouse
instead of the Apostolic Palace and pressed for the church to be more
open to the world outside the Vatican walls. And now he will join the
conversation on Instagram, one picture at a time.
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PLEASE BE POLITE