Watch the Pope Send His First Tweet on an iPad

Today was a day for somehow religious social media. Lady Gaga joined Tumblr with a blog called Amen†Fashion. The Pope joined Twitter, sent his first tweet using an iPad, uploaded a video of him tweeting on an iPad, and managed (so far) not to get a single negative YouTube comment about it. Nice try, Lady Gaga. The Pope wins today. Although he may have had some divine help in that first tweet: "Dear Friends, I just launched http://t.co/fVHpS9y Praised be our Lord Jesus Christ! With my prayers and blessings, Benedictus XVI"
But seriously look at him go on that iPad:

According to Jared Keller at The Atlantic, we can expect a lot more new media from the Vatican. Today's flurry of Pope appearances on social media is part of a broader effort to build out an online portal for Vatican happenings:

The portal, which will aggregate information from the Vatican's various print, online, radio and television media into a single, centralized destination for all things papal, will be the most extensive online venture that the Vatican has undertaken yet, bristling with multimedia goodies and social media integration. According to the Huffington Post's Nicole Winfield, that the portal will be outfitted for live-streaming of papal events, audio feeds from Vatican Radio, photographs from L'Osservatore Romano and printed texts of papal homilies, statements and speeches. Pope Benedict has reportedly been following the development of the portal.

He's probably following the development on his Twitter iPad app. Which is still so much cooler than Gaga's weird fashion photos on Tumblr.