The first time I met a friar, he asked me to email him. My first thought was “friars have email?” Email somehow felt anachronistic given the setting, but why should that be?

As Catholics, we oftentimes feel ostracized from a society that is increasingly dominated by technology. Even more so in recent years as we’ve watched the companies behind much of the technology we rely upon daily take stances inimical to Christian values.

Technology, like us, is shaped in the image of its creator. As the society around us further removes itself from its Christian bearings its creations take on ever more uncanny forms. Technology goes from being a useful tool to an oppressive master.

In other domains of life we feel that we have a choice. Rather than buying that bread with 37 ingredients on the label you can go back to basics and buy a loaf made with four simple ingredients—the same ingredients that Our Lady would have used. Even better, if you knew a local Catholic baker made fantastic bread that was reasonably priced and without all the fillers wouldn’t you want to support him?

For some reason, we’ve convinced ourselves that technology is different. Localism and small business might work in the “real world”, we might say, but when it comes to our lives online it can seem that large corporations are our only option. But it needn't be that way...

This is why we started Fidei based on the same principles you would apply when choosing to support a local Catholic baker, or farmer, or seamstress.

We chose email first because email is what technology should be: an application of new innovations to a venerable human tradition; in the case of email, letter writing. Unlike other modern online technologies, email is content to remain a tool at your disposal rather than attempting to rewrite human behavior to fit it into the toolbox.

Our goal with Fidei is ultimately to render obsolete the thought I had when I first met a Dominican Friar. In the same way one wouldn’t find it odd to find a monk using paper and pen—themselves innovations of another era—we wish to create tools made by Catholics for the faithful that enable us to live in the world, but not of it.

Email was just the start. Today, Fidei offers many of the tools individuals, families, and organizations need to live in today’s connected world, without the compromise. And, we’re just getting started.

Thank you,
Michael DiStefano