Our mission
To organize the Catholic Church's information and make it discoverable — first to those who lead and build, so that no one who is looking goes unfound.
The living map of the Church.
A map of life, not of buildings.
Somewhere tonight, a person is three miles from the help they need and doesn't know it exists. A ministry that could serve them is funded, staffed, and waiting. A Catholic with a free Saturday is wondering where to give it. None of them can see the others.
We came to this the way most people find the Church's gaps — by falling into one. Partway into building a way for Catholics to find each other, we learned by word of mouth that two other people had already built something similar. Nobody working in this space full-time had heard of either one.
If they couldn't be found by someone actively looking, they couldn't be found at all.
The Catholic Church is one of the largest networks of people and service on earth, and it has no shared map of itself. Here is what that costs, and what we're building against it.
Of every ten parishes we mapped, eight have no findable way to reach them.
For most Catholic parishes there is no website, phone number, or email address that can be found online.
A search engine can only show what has been published. Where nothing is published, better search changes nothing. The Church is largely missing from the internet everyone assumes it's on.
Anyone trying to reach a parish — people moving, traveling, in crisis, coming back after years away — and every ministry or diocese trying to work with parishes at scale.
Across 134,735 parishes we have mapped in 87 countries, we could find no contact channel at all for 82% of them. We found a website for 13%, a phone number for 9%, an email address for 3%, a Facebook page for 2%, and an Instagram account for 0.3%.
Our map covers roughly 61% of the world's parishes — about 221,700, per the Annuario Pontificio (2023).
By holding the data centrally, so a parish is findable whether or not it ever publishes anything itself — and by enriching those records continuously, instead of waiting for 134,735 organizations to update their own websites.
A listing says a parish exists. It can't say whether anyone is there.
Records can tell you a parish exists. Nothing tells you whether anything is still happening there.
A stale map is worse than no map — it sends someone to a door that doesn't open, and most people don't try twice. One bad answer costs all the trust.
Everyone using any existing Catholic directory, and every leader planning against a landscape they can't verify.
Activity can only be checked where something is published, and 87% of the parishes we mapped have no website to check. Of all 134,735, we found a youth or young-adult contact for three, and a named pastor for one in a thousand.
A parish with no website may be the most alive one on the map — the Mass offered daily, confessions heard, no one online to say so. Digital silence is a limit on what we can see, not a verdict on what is there.
By grading aliveness, not just existence — tracking freshness, dead links, and signs of activity over time, and letting organizations claim and maintain their own listing. This is the hardest part of the build, and the part nothing else does.
Both are looking. Neither can see the other.
Someone carrying a problem — grief, addiction, a mother in crisis, a way back after years away — can't find the help that already exists a few miles away. And someone with time, skill, or money to give can't find where it's wanted. Both are looking for each other, and neither can see the other.
The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Often the laborers are there too — they just can't find the field. Nothing here is missing except knowledge. The ministries are funded, staffed, and waiting; the volunteers and donors are willing. Both sides fail for the same reason — there is no shared map — which makes the entire loss avoidable.
People at the hardest moments of their lives. Catholics with a free Saturday, a professional skill, or money to give and nowhere obvious to put it. And the ministries between them, whose seats sit empty while both sides search.
1.406 billion Catholics worldwide, across 3,041 ecclesiastical jurisdictions — served by a network where we could not find a way to contact 82% of the parishes we mapped. The same wall stands in front of the person seeking help and the person offering it.
Church figures: Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae 2023, published March 2025.
By letting anyone describe their situation in ordinary words — needing help, or wanting to give it — and get somewhere real to go. Where a need keeps getting asked and nothing answers it, that gap becomes visible instead of staying private, so time, talent, and treasure can find it.
Catholic Spot is an answer engine built on Church data. Ask in plain language; the research happens behind the scenes across our own database and the open web, and comes back as an answer with its sources.
The map holds 134,735 parishes, 87 countries, 2,391 dioceses, and grows every week. Where someone already does a job well — Mass times, daily readings, established directories — we point to them rather than rebuild it.
Corporations spend millions on Domo, Power BI, Looker, and Tableau, and employ whole teams of analysts, so that leaders don't decide blind. A ministry with three staff has none of that — and what it needs isn't a dashboard of its own operations, but a view of the field around it. That view is what we're building, on the same terms for a three-person ministry as for a chancery.
When the database doesn't know, a person does — and the answer comes back with a date on it.
No database will ever hold all of it — not next year, not in a hundred. A good site can list a Mass time that changed last month, and someone drives across a state to a locked door. Search can only find what a person already wrote down somewhere a machine can read, and much of the Church's life was never written down at all.
So people are part of how this works, not a backup for when it fails. When a question can't be answered from our data or the open web, the next step is to ask someone who would know — a parish office, a diocesan desk, a ministry that has claimed its listing — and bring the answer back with their name and the date on it, for everyone who asks next. That path is being built now. We won't promise speed; we'll say we've asked, and when to look back.
And every answer carries its age. A fact confirmed in 2019 is still useful — as long as it never dresses up as a fact from today.
This is early. Coverage is uneven, some answers will be wrong, and we don't know yet is better than a guess. Every answer carries its sources so it can be checked. The percentages above describe the parishes mapped so far, not the whole world — we'd rather understate it than overstate it.
The map will never be complete. What it can be is a map that always knows how much it doesn't know, and always has a person to ask.
Every percentage on this page was measured against our own dataset of 134,735 parishes, and describes what we were able to find — not what exists. Where we could not find a parish's website, it may still have one we haven't reached. We would rather understate the Church than overstate ourselves.
Church-wide figures come from the Vatican's Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae 2023, published March 2025, and the Annuario Pontificio 2025.
Many are already planting and watering, and God gives the growth. This is an attempt to help everyone see the field.
Building something, or leading something? Partnership beats competition.
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