Catholic MCP
Twelve tools any LLM can call, over an SQLite corpus of about forty thousand rows — nine thousand saints, three hundred popes, the Catechism, the Code of Canon Law, the Marian apparitions and Eucharistic miracles, the general Roman calendar, and more. Add it once to Claude and the whole Catholic reference tradition becomes queryable.
9,025
Saints
267
Popes
216
Encyclicals
2,865
Catechism ¶
1,752
CIC Canons
21
Councils
§ i — Connect
Requires Python 3.10+ and the mcp package. Clone the repository, set up a virtualenv, and register the server with the Claude CLI. The server runs locally over stdio; your queries never leave your machine.
Also compatible with Claude Desktop (via claude_desktop_config.json) and any other MCP-capable client. A hosted endpoint at catholicmcp.com/mcp is on the roadmap and will collapse the setup to one line.
§ ii — Tools
Signatures and full behavior are in saints_db/mcp_server.py. The most-used tool is search — FTS5 full-text across every table.
§ iii — Data scope
Everything is one 34-MB SQLite database, indexed by FTS5, versioned in the git repo, portable to any host. Thirty representative tables shown below.
Full-text index over all of the above: 27,673 rows. Twelve smaller tables and internal indexes not shown.
§ iv — Visual atlases
Every table above earns a visualization eventually. The Doctors of the Church atlas is live; the rest are queued. All are built on the same MCP data — the surfaces are readers, the MCP is the source of truth.
Live
Life & declaration timeline · citation network · 37 doctors · deep-dive pages for Augustine, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Albert, John of the Cross · dozens of individual work pages.
Live
All 267 popes from Peter (30 AD) to Leo XIV (2025) on one 2,000-year baseline · saint popes highlighted · 120 conclaves plotted with elector counts · regnal name frequencies · longest and shortest pontificates.
Coming
216 encyclicals arranged by pope, era, theme · reception timelines · citation cross-references between documents.
Live
21 councils from Nicaea 325 to Vatican II · timeline with the 253-year East-West gap · convoking pope + emperor per council · full doctrinal cards · cadence chart.
Live
27 major pilgrimage sites on a stylized world map — Marian apparitions (Lourdes, Fatima, Guadalupe) · relic shrines (Loreto, Santiago) · Eucharistic-miracle sites (Lanciano, Bolsena) · all with real coordinates.
Coming
605 orders as a taxonomic tree · Benedictine branches · mendicant families · modern institutes.
Coming
The sanctoral cycle as a wheel · every feast · rank · color · saints of the day.
Coming
116 documented Eucharistic miracles · Church-approval status · scientific investigations where available.
§ v — Roadmap
Rough order. The near-term work is turning the local MCP into a hosted endpoint, plus building out the next two or three visual atlases and a browser query UI for readers who don't run an LLM.
Two atlases live. Doctors: 37 doctors, deep-dive pages for Augustine, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Albert, John of the Cross · dozens of individual work pages · citation network. Councils: all 21 councils with doctrine, documents, convoker, cadence chart, and the 253-year East-West gap.
All 27 sanctuaries have lat/lon data. First proper geographic map on the site — Guadalupe, Loreto, Częstochowa, Lourdes, Fatima, La Salette. Approval-tier filter.
Ship the same twelve tools as a Streamable-HTTP MCP so the install command becomes claude mcp add catholicmcp https://catholicmcp.com/mcp. One line, no clone, no Python required on the caller's machine.
267 popes · 120 conclaves with elector counts back to 1059 (Leo XIV's 2025 conclave included). Timeline of pontificates, elector-growth curve, side-by-side comparisons for consequential popes.
23 rites across 262 non-Latin dioceses — Ukrainian Byzantine · Syro-Malabar · Maronite · Melkite · Chaldean · Armenian · Coptic · etc. Unity in diversity, visualized honestly. A distinctive surface.
216 encyclicals arranged by pope, era, theme — Leo XIII's 86 vs. Francis's 4 is a real historical story. Plus a browser front end at /search for readers who don't run an LLM.
605 orders as taxonomic tree · 1,628 basilicas across every continent · 50 incorruptibles with the beautifully specific current_state data (visible, skull_only, tongue_only for Anthony of Padua). Plus practical daily tools built on the same corpus.
Doctores Ecclesiae
Not every saint whose theology shaped the Church is named a Doctor Ecclesiae. Only thirty-seven have been — from the four Latin Fathers Boniface VIII declared together in 1298 to Irenaeus of Lyon, added by Francis in 2022, eighteen centuries after he died. This is who they were, when they lived, and how long the Church waited to say so.
Doctors
37
Across four liturgical traditions
First named
1298
Boniface VIII — the four Latin Fathers
Longest wait
1,820yrs
Irenaeus (†202) declared in 2022
Women
4
Teresa, Catherine, Thérèse, Hildegard
§ i — Life & Declaration
Each row: a bar for the life lived, a dashed hairline for the wait, a mark at the year the Church declared them Doctor. Sorted by declaration. Click a row for the signature work and its critical edition.
§ ii — Citations
Each Doctor as a node on the same chronological baseline as the timeline above. Every arc: the citer at one end, the cited at the other. Arc thickness scales with citation count. Nearly every arc goes right-to-left — later Doctors citing earlier ones — and nearly every arc converges on Augustine, the gravity well of Latin theology.
§ iii — Cadence
Cumulative count of Doctors over seven centuries. Every jump is one pope naming several at once — most dramatically Paul VI in 1970, who added the first women.