5 years ago... The Pope makes net debut

(While we are aware it is very unlikely the man-himself gets down on his knees and fiddles with cabling, installs software or personally plans his online strategy, work with us here.)

Most recently the Pope identified the need for greater security on his website to guard against attacks from "young Americans".

The controversies surrounding the Catholic Church and religion in general means the Vatican website has set itself up as a target for hacktivists - a recent phenomenon of protestors who deface websites and plot cyber attacks to make a political or social statement.

Virus writers, hacker and crackers will also no doubt be keen to add the scalp of the Vatican to their lists of conquests but to date the site has yet to report a successful attack according to Archbishop Claudio Celli, the Vatican's spokesman.

While most people were discussing the Y2K bug, the religious significance of the year 2000 brought the Pope's own millennium problem. He was forced to open a call centre to deal with the huge increase in enquiries from Pilgrim's visiting the Vatican during the year.