The Pope Is Going Out of His Way to Start a Feud With Justin Bieber

Justin Bieber attends Power 96.1's Jingle Ball 2012 at the Philips Arena on December 12, 2012 in Atlanta.
Justin Bieber is no longer dressing like a middle-aged lesbian librarian. Photo: Butch Dill/Getty Images

You would think the pope has a lot more on his plate than starting beefs with Justin Bieber and his fans. You would think that. You would be wrong.

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Pope Benedict, white-haired, 85, and a neophyte to social media site Twitter, has beaten out 18-year old heartthrob Justin Bieber to set a percentage record for re-tweeting by his followers, the Vatican said on Thursday

While Canadian singer-songwriter Bieber has roughly 15 times as many followers - 31.7 million - the Vatican newspaper said Benedict had beaten Bieber on re-tweets.

It said about 50 percent of the pope’s followers had re-tweeted his first tweet on December 12 while only 0.7 percent of Bieber’s followers had re-tweeted one of the singer’s most popular tweets on September 26, when he commented on the death by cancer of a six-year-old fan.

So, wait, the pope crushed Bieber in terms of the percentage of followers who retweeted a tweet? We’ve never even heard of anyone citing that kind of statistic before. The pope basically just made up a metric to prove how much better he is than Justin Bieber. This seems like kind of a petty thing for the pope — not Kanye, the pope, the leader of the world’s billion or so Catholics — to do.

Pope Picks Twitter Fight With Justin Bieber