The Vatican announced yesterday that 85-year-old Pope Benedict XVI will begin posting messages on Twitter next week. Under the handle @pontifex, Benedict will post reponses to questions about matters of faith he is already accepting under the hashtag #askpontifex, according to Vatican officials.

Officials say the move to Twitter is aimed at reaching more of the Roman Catholic Church’s 1.2 billion followers, particularly young people.

“The pope’s presence on Twitter can be seen as the ‘tip of the iceberg’ that is the church’s presence in the world of new media,” the Vatican said in a statement.

Benedict’s posts will be made in Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish, with other languages added as time goes by. For the most part, the messages will contain contents of the pope’s speeches from his weekly general audience and Sunday blessings, major holiday homilies and reactions to world events.

“It’s just like the Pope having a private conversation with someone,” Archbishop Claudio Cell, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, told the BBC. “There will be no dogmatic aspect to Papal Tweets.”

The posts will be written by Benedict’s aides, but the pope will “engage and approve” the Tweets.

“Once the Pope has personally approved the @Pontifex Tweet, someone else will send it mechanically from a computer within the Vatican Secretariat of State,” Irish priest Paul Tighe, who is in charge of the Vatican’s new media department, told the BBC, adding papal Tweets will not contain hashtags.

Presently @Pontifex is only following @Pontifex_fr and other translated versions. It is unlikely the Pope’s account will follow any other users. Currently the account has about 359,000 followers. UK betting agency Ladbrokes says the odds are the Pope will have a million followers by the end of 2012.

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