One Small Tweet for Pope....

Money shot....

MONEY SHOT!!!

FINALLY.

Suffice it to say, that went way better than ever could've been imagined years back.

Launching News.va -- a significant revamp of the Holy See's online information presence -- on the eve of the feast of Saints Peter and Paul (and, of course, his 60th anniversary as a priest), the moment didn't just see B16 tooling around on an iPad to launch the portal with a "PopeClick," but likewise a first tweet from a Roman pontiff....

In the shot above, the Pope was flanked by the president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, and his freshly-arrived Sostituto (Chief of Staff), Archbishop Angelo Becciu, whose presence on Facebook shows how far and how fast things have come.

While Vatican officials sought to focus primarily on the "PopeClick" in the run-up to tonight's launch, the previously-unannounced papal tweet -- which was sent out in English and Italian -- took the headline of a lengthy piece running in tomorrow's edition of L'Osservatore Romano, which hit newsstands shortly after the website went live.

Video:



...and as history goes, what you see there will rank alongside this -- the launch of Vatican Radio by Pius XI, 80 years ago this winter:


On a side-note, good to see the Home Office finally got its iPad 2s in -- two senior Curialists who took the plunge and ordered the latest revision to the tablet shortly after its spring release spent weeks waiting for their arrival, just like the rest of the world.

PHOTOS: Pool

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