The Power of Intimate Communication
“Because the Web is so personalized, because you can reach the whole person through it, there’s a real power of intimacy in it,” says Brother Aquinas. “From a commercial standpoint, you can use that intimacy to really very powerfully affect what the person is going to buy. That’s fine, but if that’s all that this power is used for, it’s going to be a terrible thing for people, on a human level.”
    

Brother Mary Aquinas Woodworth (nextScribe)

Four years ago, Brother Aquinas created the scriptorium@christdesert, a Web design studio at Christ in the Desert founded to put new monks to work for the benefit of the monastery. The studio quickly became famous for not only for its HTML programming, but for the beautiful original artwork the monks worked into their pages, reminiscent of centuries-old illuminated text.
     “In the Middle Ages, you sat in front of a book with a quill pen and illustrated,” says Abbot Philip, who runs the monastery. “Today, the tools are different, but the spirituality of the work is still there.”
     The popularity of the monastery’s pages led Brother Aquinas to the Vatican, where he helped develop a site for the Holy See and the Pope. It also made him think about other ways the church could reach out through the Internet.
     “The Vatican is not built for doing the media,” Brother Aquinas says. “That’s just not its purpose in life.”

A New Vocation Online
So about a year ago, Brother Aquinas left his cloistered life, moved from the monastery to Santa Fe and set up nextScribe. He’s now trying to raise money and recruit talented programmers, artists and writers to begin work on a Catholic “portal” site—a one-stop, subscriber-only Internet site featuring news, music, video, games and other interactive hooks for all ages, all with a Catholic message.
     The fund-raising is a monumental task in and of itself: Woodworth says he’ll probably need an investment of $5 million to start designing a site and eventually get it online. But he doesn’t think that’s unrealistic.
     “There are 70 million Catholics in the United States. Even assuming that only 10 percent of them are on the Internet, and that’s conservative, you still have 7 million potential customers for this site,” Brother Aquinas says. “That puts us No. 2 behind America Online.”
     Brother Aquinas is actively recruiting HTML programmers, but the job may not appeal to most Silicon Valley refugees. He expects his workers to live by Catholic moral principles, pray at work, and make the job their calling.

A Long, Hard Road Ahead
Brother Aquinas has attracted some attention within the church.
     “Aquinas tends to be the one voice in the wilderness,” says Francis X. Maier, chancellor of the Archdiocese of Denver. “It’s hard to do what he wants to do on his own. He loves the institutional Church, but he has a deep understanding of its limitations. His work is really visionary.”
     Maier and his boss, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, understand the digital medium better than most. The Archdiocese last month sponsored Newtech ’98, a conference that attracted 50 bishops from around the world. In three days, church leaders met with such digital-age luminaries as Neil Postman and Esther Dyson, and discussed ways the church should approach new technologies such as the Internet.
     “In a sense, the Web isn’t a very important issue at all when you look at poverty and violence,” Maier says. “But in another sense, it’s very important because it represents the new language that we can use to talk about all these other issues.”