Among the community of iPhone developers it is a reasonably safe bet that not too many of them wear wimples and sing vespers on a regular basis, which makes Sister Catherine Wybourne (who tweets as @Digitalnun), Benedictine nun, HTML coder and now iPhone developer, something of special case.
The web has proved a bonus for the monastery where she is Prioress of the Benedictine Nuns of Holy Trinity Monastery. The monastery runs a profitable web design and hosting service (“The only problem is, that everyone expects nuns to charge nothing. I have to point out that we’re not doing this to occupy our time”), and she sees the iPhone as a great opportunity. Sr. Catherine is developing two apps—one is for the general public, the other for parish priests (does that make it a B2B app?).
“We are going to charge for our apps because we are in the middle of a fundraising campaign and we are trying to get people to get hold of the idea of philanthropic investment. So it would not be a good idea on the one hand to say please invest in us, and on the other give everything away for free. People do not value what they get for free.
“One of the applications will be about the rule of St. Benedict. The one with the commercial possibilities will help parish priests. I can’t say what it is we are doing, but I cannot believe that no one has thought of this idea.
“We are developing this ourselves in-house. I use Phonegap for development. We never have any money and that’s why we learned how to do things for ourselves.”
The monastery in Oxfordshire, has been at the forefront of using the net to promulgate religious teaching, and that includes online retreats, blogs, social media and mobile apps. She was a guest speaker at last week’s Faith 2.0 conference where we caught up with her.
The monastery she heads up (and I am told off for mistakenly calling it a nunnery “don’t call us a nunnery. We haven’t been nunnery since the Middle Ages”) has been at the vanguard of using the web. So why?
“We are a very small community. Our online outreach started as an expression in contemporary terms of traditional monastic hospitality. We provide a space there where people can learn something about the monastery and the things we do. They can interact with us, that’s why we have podcasts and videos etc. We have online retreats because we can’t accommodate people at the monastery.”
The monastery has launched a successful series of online retreats. Participants, who pay a fee, are given readings to complete and contemplate and then participants can discuss and share their findings via a chat room and a dedicated email address.
“One of the things that has struck me is how many lonely people there are, how many seekers there are. One of the things that fascinated me when we launched our online retreat was about 40% of the enquiries were from men. Now you don’t get men going to monasteries of nuns because they hate the idea of being with a load of middle-aged women. That was very interesting.”
Technology has not always been kind to the monasteries. It was one of the first industries to be disrupted by technology, the introduction of the printing press upset what had been a nice business in illuminating manuscripts. But Sr. Catherine, who for a time ran the Stanbrook Abbey Press where she revived some old skills, such as printing on handmade paper, has introduced some new ones such as electronic publishing. She says religion has always been an early adopter.
“Certainly among the Benedictines we tried to adapt to the latest technology in every generation. We were very quick to adopt printing. I think the first book was Boethius around 1526 by the monks of Glastonbury. That was the first purely monastic production. And then in the 19th century they all set up monastic printing houses.”
And at that point, Sr. Catherine’s phone goes. It is a text: “Oh, how lovely, someone is watching the videostream,” and off she goes.
