The Church has always understood that truth requires media — vessels through which it is carried across time and distance. The Fathers wrote letters. The monks illuminated manuscripts. The friars preached in the open squares of Europe. The Council Fathers broadcast their proceedings across the radio.
Every generation finds new vessels. This one has APIs.
What Torch & Lily Is
Torch & Lily is a Catholic data API — a structured, verified, freely accessible layer of data built for developers who are building the next generation of Catholic software.
Five engines. One unified interface.
- Veritas — Scripture, the Summa Theologica, and the great theological texts, structured and queryable.
- Devotio — The saints, AI-refined and verified against primary hagiographic sources.
- Tempus — The liturgical calendar, computed algorithmically for any date, any rite.
- Corpus — The physical Church: over 12,000 mapped parishes, cathedrals, and sacred sites across the United States, with diocese boundary data.
- Communio — An anonymous, global intercessory prayer network.
Why It Exists
If you are a Catholic developer and you want to build something, you will quickly discover that the data is everywhere and nowhere. Scattered PDFs. Hagiographic databases behind paywalls. Liturgical calendar APIs that contradict each other. No single, clean, structured, freely accessible source of Catholic data optimized for developers.
So you spend more time hunting for data than building your product.
Torch & Lily exists to end that.
What We Are Building Toward
This is alpha software built by one person. It is honest about what it is. But the vision is clear: a unified operating system for the Faith — the Digital Scriptorium — that any Catholic developer, anywhere in the world, can build upon without reinventing the wheel.
The Epistulae — these dispatches — will carry news of what is being added, what is changing, and what is being discerned. Subscribe below if you want to be among the first to know.
Aedificamus Civitatem Dei.