Good Friday broadcast will make him the first pontiff to take part in a televised question-and-answer session
The Pope will take a small but significant step into the modern media age this afternoon when he becomes the first pontiff to take part in a televised question-and-answer session.
It will not, however, be a Today programme-style grilling on controversial issues for the Catholic church such as child abuse. The pre-recorded Good Friday broadcast will show Benedict XVI answering a small number of pre-selected questions about Jesus and the Christian thinking behind world events.
The 80-minute programme, In His Image – A Good Friday Special, on Italy's publicly owned RAI channel, will begin at 2.10pm local time (1.10pm BST) so it can be on TV at 3pm, the moment that Jesus is traditionally thought to have died on the cross, the Catholic news agency CNA said.
The RAI website for the programme has been soliciting questions for the pope and those selected have an apparently deliberate global and multifaith spread. According to CNA they will include one from a Muslim woman in Ivory Coast asking about Jesus's role in teaching peace, and one from a group of seven Christian students from Baghdad.
The agency quotes the website as saying viewers will also hear "questions from an Italian mother whose son was in a coma for many years and a young Japanese girl who wrote to ask the pope to explain the cause of the recent earthquake".
The idea for the broadcast came from its host, Rosario Carello, who said it was initially devised as a format in which viewers could ask questions about Jesus. The production team them came up with the idea of asking Benedict to answer them. While the idea seemed "crazy", they gave it a try, CNA quoted Carello as saying: "We proposed it and the Pope accepted."