POPE FRANCIS…’TOP OF THE POPS’ ON FACEBOOK!

St. Peter’s Basilica at Early Morning (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Thanks in part to the Vatican’s public relations guru Greg Burke, Pope Francis aka Jorge Mario Bergogliohas taken the world by storm since his ascendancy to the papacy. Social media sites are abuzz with his name, for Pope Francis tops the list of what Facebook’s 1.2 billion users are talking about worldwide. Why he even beat Nelson Mandela and Miley Cyrus! Furthermore, a survey by Twiplomacy named Pope Francis the most influential world leader on Twitter. The Pontiff’s, @Pontifex account gets an average of 8,200 retweets for every English tweet. Without doubt, Pope Francis is the most-talked about person of the year online. “To proclaim Christ in the digital era is a special field for the work of the young,” said the Pope. The Pontiff may well be redefining religion by reaching Christians who may have been hitherto unreachable? Not wishing to sound too much of a cynic, its easy to be an armchair Christian paying lip-service to Catholicism. I do wonder how many of the Pope’s online followers live…or will live the life he advocates? Popularity means nothing if it doesn’t lead to something significant! I further wonder what the Christ would have made of the social media phenomena? He might say, “Get out there and do as I did…make a personal sacrifice for the benefit of another!”