No really. This Sunday is World Communications Day, and to keep in touch with the modern world the Catholic Church will be launching the excellently named Pope2You service.

Despite sounding like some sort of mail order Pope delivery service, this is the Vatican’s intiative to keep in touch with the modern world following on Barack Obama’s highly profiled excellent use of new media in his election campaign. The Pope will now have his own Facebook app (apparently you can “meet the Pope on Facebook, listen to his words, see his pictures and receive his messages of congratulations through virtual postcards”), an iPhone app and the YouTube channel which has already been used for the Easter message – but no Twitter account.

While I’m sure the Pope is a rather busy man, the lack of a Twitter stream seems like something of an oversight. The Catholic Church isn’t exactly known as the most progressive movement so I am genuinely quite impressed that they have made it onto Facebook, but Twitter is the most popular and talked about service at the moment and they are missing a really big opportunity. People are even tweeting from space so surely it would not have been much more of a stretch to set up a Twitter account?