Even though he has not sent a single tweet yet, Pope Benedict had more than half a million Twitter followers in eight languages yesterday, two daysafter the Vatican unveiled his handle: @Pontifex.

The Vatican... said it has taken precautions to make sure the Pope’s certified account is not hacked

They included people ranging from the simple Roman Catholic faithful to a Jewish head of state.

“Your Holiness, welcome to Twitter. Our relations with the Vatican are at their best and can form a basis to further peace everywhere,” tweeted Israeli President Shimon Peres, who at 89 is four years older than the Pontiff.

The Vatican said on Monday that Pope Benedict will start tweeting on mostly spiritual topics from December 12.

The Pope actually has eight linked Twitter accounts. @Pontifex, the main account, is in English.

The other seven have a suffix at the end for the different language versions. For example, the German version is @Pontifex_de, and the Arabic version is @Pontifex_ar.

Yesterday afternoon, the English version had the most followers, with over 477,000. The next largest was Spanish, with some 110,450. The lowest number of followers was the Arabic, with about 4,460. Benedict’s native German had about 12,245.

But the Pope, leader of some 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, will not be following anyone but himself, the Vatican said.

A look at his official Twitter page yesterday showed that he is “following” seven people but they are merely versions of his own Twitter account in different languages.

The first papal tweets will be answers to questions sent to #askpontifex. He will push the button on his first tweet himself on December 12 but in the future most of the tweets will be written by aides, and he will sign off on them.

The Vatican, whose website has been taken down by hackers in the past, said it has taken precautions to make sure the Pope’s certified account is not hacked. Only one computer in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State will be used for the tweets.