Pope Benedict XVI has officially become the first Pope to embrace social media. At 6:00am EST this morning, the Pope tweeted out his first message to nearly one million followers using the Twitter handle @Pontifex, promptly making headlines worldwide and sparking plenty of conversation online.

The tweet was posted on Benedict’s English-based account, and read:

Dear friends, I am pleased to get in touch with you through Twitter. Thank you for your generous response. I bless all of you from my heart.

Catholic commentator Rocco Palmo notes: “In the minutes surrounding the launch, the eight language feeds for the PopeTweets surpassed a combined million followers, two-thirds of whom have signed onto the English-speaking account.”

Since his first tweet, the Pope has sent out a flurry of others, responding to messages and communicating with Catholics around the globe. Interestingly, most of those connecting with the Pope are based out of South America and parts of Africa, according to FloatingSheep.org‘s follower-distribution map , which analyzed the geographic data on @Pontifex’s followers.

So now that the Pope is active on Twitter, we have to ask: what would you tweet to him?