POPE BENEDICT XVI JOINS TWITTER

Pope Benedict XVI has launched an official Twitter account with the handle @pontifex. But he won't tweet before Wednesday, Dec. 12, according to the Vatican.

The move was announced in November, when a Vatican official said the Pope (or, more precisely, whoever handles his Twitter account) would be tweeting fairly infrequently, with his tweets "not veering far from his texts."

The Pope's account currently doesn't have any tweets. It follows 7 other accounts, which are all versions of the same account in different languages: German, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Italian, French and Arabic.

The new account is not the Pope's first encounter with Twitter; last year, he sent a tweet from the Vatican's official account, coinciding with a new Vatican information site, news.va.