Right now, Pope Francis’s Twitter account in 9 languages, @Pontifex, has exceeded 40 million followers. The news is given today by the Secretariat for Communication of the Holy See, pointing out that “such result has been achieved a few weeks from the fifth anniversary of the opening of the Pope’s account, on December 12th 2012, on Benedict XVI’s resolve”. Every day, through his tweets, the Secretariat points out, “Pope Francis is close to people, even on social media, sometimes offering a spiritual thought, recalling the Saint of the day, sometimes sharing with his followers a reflection on events that are greatly relevant to the international community. Interest in the Pope’s words on Twitter has never diminished in the last few years. Actually, in the last 12 months, his followers have grown by over 9 million, showing that people are unfailingly interested in the Holy Father’s tweets – ordinary people, Christians and non Christians, political leaders, people of culture”. “Pope Francis’s being personally on social media”, the Secretariat for Communication emphasises, “goes hand in hand with his many statements on the Christian mission in the ‘digital Continent’. During his first message for the World Day of Social Communication, posted on January 24th 2014, the Pontiff stated that ‘the digital web can be a place full of humanity, not a web of threads but a web of humans (…) Personal involvement is at the very root of a communicator’s reliability. It is because of this that the Christian testimony can reach existential suburbs through the web’. In addition to his 40 million followers on Twitter, Pope Francis is now close to reach 5 million followers (4.9 million have already been exceeded) on Instagram, a social channel for pictures”. His account, @Franciscus, was opened on March 19th 2015 with this message: “I am starting a new path to cover with you the way of God’s mercy and tenderness”. Remarkably, the Secretariat concludes, “the age group that mostly follows the Pope on Instagram is 25 to 34 old, the countries where he is most widely followed: Brazil and the United States. The Holy Father wanted his two accounts to be coordinated by the Secretariat for Communication of the Holy See, in consultation with the Secretariat of State”.