Meet 'digital nun': the very modern Sister funding her monastery through apps

Original article written by Jessica Abrahams printed in The Daily Telegraph - Click here for the link.

Convent life is enjoying a revival in Britain with the number of new nuns at an all-time high. Jessica Abrahams speaks to a very modern nun - Sister Catherine Wybourne who codes, tweets, and vlogs

British nuns are having a revival. New statistics show that the number of women going into convents has risen six-fold in the past decade and is at a 25-year high.

According to the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, there has now been a steady increase in new nuns - and it could be due to people trying to fill a gap in their lives.

It comes after a quiet reinvention of the role nuns play in social initiatives. They're now as likely to find themselves accompanying police on raids to rescue trafficked women forced to work as sex slaves in brothels, as sitting in quiet contemplation.

Nuns no longer fit the traditional stereotypes of being out-of-touch with modern communities. Take Sister Catherine Wybourne.

She's a web and app developer with 15,000 followers on Twitter. She produces podcasts, YouTube videos and e-books and runs a selection of websites and blogs. And she does all this from the small rural monastery where she lives as a Catholic nun.

I first heard about her when I stumbled across her LinkedIn profile last month while researching religious communities. A “Benedictine nun and web developer” was not what I had been expecting to find. The prioress of the Holy Trinity Monastery in Herefordshire, which she helped to found in 2004, she now leads a mostly self-sufficient life there with just one other nun, Sister Lucy, and a dog named Brother Duncan.

But running a monastery requires income and – while nuns elsewhere bring in money by making soaps or jams – Sister Catherine has established a professional web design and maintenance service, offering everything from hosting to content management to social media integration, which goes by the name of “Veilnet”. I had to find out more.

Sister Catherine Wybourne is often looking down... not in prayer but at her phone

Holy Trinity is a “cloistered” community, meaning the nuns rarely leave the grounds of the monastery (about eight miles outside the city of Hereford) and then only with the permission of the bishop - but Sister Catherine wasn't hard to reach. She has built up a solid online following through her brilliantly named Twitter account, @Digitalnun, and her blog, iBenedictines.org. Even the monastery dog has a Twitter account, @BroDuncanPBGV – with Sister Catherine, a strand of humour seems to run through everything. “Just been telephoned by someone asking whether I'd any views on #nuns using #SocialMedia,” she tweeted recently – someone who clearly didn't know she was “the digital nun”. “Can you imagine my response? ;)”

Now 60, Sister Catherine began her career as a banker after studying history at Cambridge, a job she “enjoyed enormously,” she says. But the possibility of joining a monastery had been at the back of her mind ever since her days at a Catholic boarding school - where she had been impressed by the “terribly broad minded and intellectually curious” nuns who ran it – and in 1981, at the age of 27, she left banking and joined the Benedictines; it's hard to imagine a more dramatic change of cultures.

It was at her first monastery, Stanbrook Abbey in Worcester, which had its own printing press, that she became interested in technology. “I was working in the monastery printing room when we were changing from letterpress to offset litho,” she tells me. “Of course back in the 80s printers were some of the most technologically-advanced people in the world because they were all using Apple Macs and phototypesetting and so forth. And so I got interested in the computer side of things, and naturally that led to my urging the community [at the monastery] to get a website done, which we did in the 1990s.” Then, in 2004, when she helped to found Holy Trinity Monastery, “not only did we build our own website,” she recalls, “but we tried to take it one step further by doing podcasts and videos, and adding interactive elements like forums and online chapters [meetings], at a time when comparatively few Churchy people were interested in those things.”

Theodora Hawksley, 29, is a young nun who has joined the Congregation of Jesus (PA)

With little funding to achieve this, she and her fellow sisters (there were three of them at the monastery at the time) simply learnt about web design and digital and social media and did it all themselves. Since then Sister Catherine has taken on external clients, developing websites for computers and smartphones on a professional basis. But, although nowadays her skills are a source of financial support for the monastery, there was a religious motivation for developing them:

“The Rule of St Benedict [guidance for monks and nuns in the Benedictine order, written by the saint in the 6th century] is very keen on what it calls 'hospitality'; that is, welcoming people to the monastery and giving them a taste of what cloistered life is like,” she explains. “And we thought the internet is a brilliant way of doing that.”

Sisters Catherine and Lucy also create audiobooks for the visually impaired as part of their charitable work, and offer a collection of “online retreats”, where participants wanting “some time alone with God” can listen to podcasts, read religious texts and take guidance from the nuns, with packages including chatrooms and Skype meetings. Sister Catherine is currently working on a personal project which will see the Rule of St Benedict made available via an app in English and Latin – a 21st century update for a 6th century text.

“I think it would be fair to say that in this country [within the monastic community], we have probably been a bit of a trailblazer,” she tells me. “Firstly because we built all the websites and so forth ourselves, and secondly because we were quite early adopters of things like podcasts and videos, which now everybody takes for granted. I think... you'll find that practically every monastery in the country [now] has an internet presence with all the bells and whistles.”

The internet has become an effective way of reaching out, and being reached, for the nuns. But cloistered or enclosed communities were never as isolated as one might think, she says. “Just thinking about Stanbrook, where we started, there were always masses of people going there or in touch with the nuns through postal correspondence... But I think the internet has made it much easier to... focus on what really matters and yet remain open to other people. If one has a guest... one can't ignore them... [Whereas] if one is dealing with people a lot online, one can just switch off when necessary.” And while some monasteries have a wary approach to technology, restricting their members' access to the internet, most have come to see it as an important channel of communication.

“Being cloistered doesn't mean that you have to have an enclosed mind, or an enclosed approach to things,” Sister Catherine concludes. “We describe the internet as being the fourth wall of our cloister, and it's open to everybody.” Amen to that, I’ll say.