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In 1995 the Monastery of Christ in the Desert produced a website, www.christdesert.org, that by 1996 had attained a market reach of 12% of online users — a reach that ranked it among the top five online destinations in the world, and thus among Yahoo, Netscape and the other most trafficed sites of the early years of the Internet.
The director of the monastery's web project, Br. Aquinas, was subsequently called to Vatican City where he served as a resident consultant to the Holy See. While there he composed a strategic Internet plan for the Vatican, based upon the long term potential of ubiquitous personal digital networks to enrich human relationships and spiritual community. Br. Aquinas then founded nextScribe to conduct the research and development that would be necessary to advance the objectives of that plan.
Subsequently, nextScribe has undertaken research projects with both Catholic and Protestant churches.
While directing nextScribe, Br. Aquinas' strictly cloistered monastic vows came up for renewal. Upon consideration of Br. Aquinas' new mission, his Archbishop judged that his new vocation to develop the spiritual potential of social digital networks — which had carried him from a primitive desert hermitage to Rome and an active life working with lay people — was no longer that of a hermit monk. Thus, though Aquinas no longer bears monastic vows or the title "Brother," he has retained the name of his vocational patron, St. Thomas Aquinas.
