In July, the leader of the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict, will use SMS to reach out to young Catholics during World Youth Day in Sydney, Australia.

According to Reuters, the pope will use SMS to send daily messages of inspiration during the 6-day event. The church also plans to set up a Catholic social networking Website akin to Facebook.

As many as 225,000 young Catholics are expected to attend the event, and the Catholic Church said it wanted to use technology to connect to this increasingly tech-savvy audience.

Australian operator Telstra is scheduled to provide voice, data, mobile, broadband and broadcast services for the event. Besides the youth audience, Telstra said it plans to connect 8,000 volunteers, 2,000 clergy and 3,000 journalists to more than 700 locations around Sydney.

No word on what type of wireless device the pontiff uses.