VATICAN CITY - Pope Benedict XVI boasted hundreds of thousands of followers on his new Twitter account on Tuesday - just a day after it was unveiled and more than a week before any actual tweets appear. The English-language version of the @pontifex handle had more than 376,000 followers - up from 2,400 at the time of the announcement. Counting all the eight languages of the accounts on which papally-approved tweets will appear, the number of followers was more than 500,000. The numbers still represent only a tiny fraction of the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics who follow the pope offline and are far lower than for celebrity singers Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber.