Pope launches Vatican YouTube channel

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Puffs of smoke, speeches in Latin and multipage encyclicals have all been used by the Vatican to communicate with the faithful.

Now the pope is trying to broaden his audience by joining the wannabe musicians, college pranksters and water-skiing squirrels on YouTube.

In his inaugural YouTube foray Friday, Benedict welcomed viewers to this “great family that knows no borders” and said he hoped they would “feel involved in this great dialogue of truth.”

“Today is a day that writes a new page in history for the Holy See,” Vatican Radio said in describing the launch of the site, www.youtube.com/vatican.

The Vatican said that with the YouTube channel, it hoped to broaden and unite the pontiff’s audience — an estimated 1.4 billion people are online worldwide — while giving the Holy See better control over the pope’s Internet image.

The pontiff joins President Barack Obama, who launched an official White House channel on his inauguration day, as well as Queen Elizabeth, who went online with her royal YouTube channel in December 2007.