Pope Benedict has blessed his more than 1 million Twitter followers in his first tweet [Twitter message] from his new account on the social network.
The pontiff touched a computerized screen to send the message during his weekly general audience at the Vatican.
Within an hour of sending out the first tweet, the pope posted and answered a question sent to him on Twitter about faith.
The pope tweets under the handle @pontifex [at pontifex] in the eight languages of his account.
The Vatican says the Twitter messages, which are limited to 140 characters, will not be written by the pope himself,` but by church officials who will submit them for his approval.
Watch related video of Pope Benedict tweeting
Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.