Thanks to a heavenly marketing campaign we’ve known that this was coming for a while, but earlier today His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI dropped his first tweet from the official @Pontifex account, where he name-dropped Twitter and thanked the network for a “generous response”.

Of note: the tweet was sent from an iPad. Isn’t that one of the signs of the apocalypse?

The tweet read as follows:

“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.”

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.

— Benedict XVI (@Pontifex) December 12, 2012

This same message was then quickly translated and re-sent via the Pope’s seven other official Twitter accounts, which are in German, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Italian, French and Arabic.

While Twitter no longer lets you know which device was used to send a tweet, third-party applications still provide this information. As you can see in the screen grab below “he” – meaning whichever member of the Vatican’s marketing team is writing these messages – was clearly using an iPad.