Pope Francis Joins Instagram

Seeing as the 79-year-old papal already has quite the impressive social media following on Twitter – 8.9 million fans! – we can only guess that his Instagram account will be just as popular. According to CNN, his account will be separated from the official Vatican account and it will be administered by Vatican members.

Now, the pontiff is making headlines again with the Vatican’s announcement that he joined the photo-sharing site Instagram.

Pope Francis is the first leader of the Catholic Church to join the image-based app. In 2013, four days after his inauguration, he took over his precursor Pope Benedict XVI’s Twitter account.

Pope Francis has expanded his online presence by gracing Instagram with his holiness.

The Vatican says the Instagram feed will include photos and videos from the Pope’s daily life that highlight “closeness” and “inclusion”.

In addition to the one seeking prayer, Pope Francis has made only one other post so far, another of him in kneeling in prayer.

Instagram founder Kevin Systrom – who has met the Pontiff before – was on hand to help the Pope deal with any filtering or cropping issues that came up. We spoke about the power of images to unite people across different cultures and languages. “Your messages of humility, compassion and mercy will leave a lasting mark”, Systrom wrote on Instagram with a picture of him with the pope.

It started with the Pope on Twitter, where he announced his arrival to Instagram.

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And users were engaging with the Pope on the platform long before he launched his account. Francis drew a parallel to that with some European countries’ refusal to take responsibility for some of the more than 1 million refugees who reached European Union shores previous year after risky sea voyages arranged by smugglers.