FEW nuns can say they balance their lives in service of God with a career as a high-profile web developer with 15,000 followers on Twitter.

But Sister Catherine Wybourne, who previously lived at Stanbrook Abbey in Callow End, near Worcester, is not your regular nun.

The Benedictine nun now runs Holy Trinity Monastery in Wormbridge, near Hereford, and keeps the lights on not by selling jam or appealing for donations, but through a successful web design and maintenance service.

Sister Catherine – who is known as @Digitialnun on Twitter and blogs regularly at ibenedictines.org – began life as a banker after studying history at Cambridge, but decided to leave the financial world behind and joined Stanbrook Abbey in 1981 aged 27.

Speaking to The Telegraph, she said it was while running the printing press at Stanbrook she became interested in technology, and when she founded the Holy Trinity Monastery in 2004 she was keen ensure it had an online presence.

“Not only did we build our own website, 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,” she said.

As well as providing web design services for a number of external clients, Sister Catherine also spends her time developing high-tech resources including audiobooks for the visually impaired and running ‘online retreats’.

“Being cloistered doesn't mean that you have to have an enclosed mind, or an enclosed approach to things,” she said. “We describe the internet as being the fourth wall of our cloister and it's open to everybody.”