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

The pontiff joins President Barach 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.

For the Vatican, it was the latest effort to keep up to speed with the rapidly changing field of communications and new media. For a 2,000-year-old institution known for being very set in its ways, it was something of a revolution.

At the same time, though, the pope warned he wasnt embracing virtual communication without some reservation.

In his annual message for the World Day of Communication, Benedict praised as a “gift to humanity” the benefits of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace in forging friendships and understanding.

But he also warned that virtual socializing had its risks, saying “obsessive” online networking could isolate people from real social interaction and broaden the digital divide by further marginalizing people.

And he urged producers of new media to ensure the content respected human dignity and the “goodness and intimacy of human sexuality.”

The 81-year-old pope has been extremely wary of new media, warning about what he has called the tendency of entertainment media, in particular, to trivialize sex and promote violence.

But Monsignor Claudio Maria Celli, who heads the Vaticans social communications office, said the pope fully approved of the YouTube channel, saying Benedict was “a man of dialogue” who wanted to engage with people wherever they were.

In that way, he is merely following in the footsteps of Pope John Paul II, who avidly used mass media and information technology to get out his message. John Paul oversaw the 1995 launch of the Vaticans Web site, http://www.vatican.va which today includes virtual tours of the Vatican Museums and audio feeds from Vatican Radio.

While John Paul wasnt a big computer user, he did tap out a very public online message in 2001, an apology for missionary abuses against indigenous peoples of the South Pacific.

The Vaticans press office even alerted the world of John Pauls April 2, 2005, death by sending an e-mail with a text-messaged alert to journalists.

Asked if Benedict himself surfs the Web, Celli quipped: “Knowing him, that hes a man of research, a man who is up to speed with things, Id have to respond affirmatively.”

One of his advisers, Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, the archbishop of Naples, has gone a step further: He has his own Facebook profile. So does Cardinal Roger Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles.

Celli said the Vatican was mulling over a similar presence on Facebook.

While the YouTube initiative was novel, it was in keeping with the Churchs history of using whatever means available to communicate: parchment, printing press, radio, television and Internet, noted Monsignor Robert Wister, professor of church history at the Immaculate Conception School of Theology at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.

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