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| 1 | +--- |
| 2 | +layout: post |
| 3 | +title: "A new chapter for Open Source Catholic: announcing the Catholic Digital Commons Foundation" |
| 4 | +date: 2026-04-23 01:31:00 +0200 |
| 5 | +categories: [community, opensource, foundation] |
| 6 | +author: johnrdorazio |
| 7 | +comments: true |
| 8 | +--- |
| 9 | + |
| 10 | +After years of conversations, drafts, and quiet collaboration behind the scenes, I'm glad to be able to share some news with this community: the **Catholic Digital Commons Foundation** has been formally incorporated, and Open Source Catholic is entering a new chapter alongside it. What follows is the story of how we got here — where we started, the people who made it possible, what the new foundation is (and isn't), and an invitation for those of you who have been reading along to take the next step with us. |
| 11 | + |
| 12 | +## Where we started |
| 13 | + |
| 14 | +Open Source Catholic was launched back in 2009 by Jeff Geerling, in the wake of the Catholic New Media Convention, with a simple but ambitious premise: that Catholics working in software could share their projects, their struggles, and their reasoning out in the open, for the good of the Church. Open Source Catholic has been a small but steady witness to that idea ever since, a place where a parish webmaster, a full-time developer, and a priest who codes on the side could meet on equal ground. |
| 15 | + |
| 16 | +A few years ago I joined this community to share some of the work I had been doing: the [BibleGet API](https://www.bibleget.io) and its family of plugins for word processors and websites, the [Liturgical Calendar API](https://litcal.johnromanodorazio.com) that computes the universal and particular calendars of the Roman Rite, and the [Semina Verbi wiki](https://seminaverbi.bibleget.io) that tries to gather the traces of the Gospel across human culture. None of these are finished projects. They are all, in different ways, works of patience. What has kept them moving forward, more than anything else, is that there is a community around them. |
| 17 | + |
| 18 | +## The Catholic Devs slack |
| 19 | + |
| 20 | +Out of the same impulse, a few of us helped launch the Catholic Devs slack workspace, a space where developers from around the world could have the back-and-forth conversations that a blog or a mailing list can't quite support. It has grown steadily, and today it is a place where questions about liturgical data, missal typography, parish platforms, Bible APIs, and a dozen other problems get asked and answered every week. If you haven't joined yet, you can request an invite either from the [CDCF community page](https://catholicdigitalcommons.org/community) or from the ["Get My Invite" button on our own chat page](https://www.opensourcecatholic.com/chat/) — come say hello. |
| 21 | + |
| 22 | +What has always struck me about this slack and about the broader Open Source Catholic community is how many people are doing serious, high-quality work, often on their own time, with very little structural support. Projects survive on the goodwill of individuals. Knowledge is passed informally. When someone steps back, things can quietly fall apart. This is a long-standing problem in open source generally, and it is even more acute in a niche like ours. |
| 23 | + |
| 24 | +## How we got here |
| 25 | + |
| 26 | +The idea of a foundation had been on my mind for some years, shaped by watching how the Apache Software Foundation, the Document Foundation, the Linux Foundation, and the WordPress project have each given durable structure to volunteer communities that would otherwise have dispersed — and by the wish to see the same pattern applied, in our own particular way, to technology in service of the Church's evangelizing mission. A meeting with Fr. Charbel Bteich gave the idea fresh impetus, and I began drafting a proposal for a Vatican foundation, reviewed along the way by Giovanni Silvestri at the IT Office of the Italian Bishops Conference, and eventually sent to Pope Francis. |
| 27 | + |
| 28 | +Going from idea to reality, though, takes people. On May 8, 2025 I stood in Saint Peter's Square with Tim Connors to witness the election of Pope Leo XIV, and it was out of that encounter that Tim put me in touch with Fr. Josh McCarty, Taylor Black, Andrew DeBerry, and others who were already hard at work building up a community of Catholic developers. That the new pontiff was an American, with a mathematician's training and an expressed desire to continue Pope Leo XIII's work of confirming the Church's social teaching — now in the digital era — felt like a further confirmation of the timeliness of what we were setting out to do. Taylor and I very quickly discovered that we were circling the same conviction, and a small team began meeting to sketch what a Catholic open source foundation might look like. Jeff Geerling and Mike Kasberg from Open Source Catholic joined some of those conversations, as did Matthew Sanders, CEO of Longbeard and the originator of the Builders AI Forum (BAIF), and Andrew DeBerry, who would go on to join the initial board. |
| 29 | + |
| 30 | +In November 2025, Taylor and I brought the idea to the BAIF at the Gregorian University, and the enthusiasm of the participants there was enough to convince us that it was time to move from conversation to incorporation. JM Boyd put us in touch with Daniel Hennessy, a Catholic lawyer in Texas, who handled the legal filing. |
| 31 | + |
| 32 | +## A next step: the Catholic Digital Commons Foundation |
| 33 | + |
| 34 | +On January 21, 2026, the [Catholic Digital Commons Foundation](https://catholicdigitalcommons.org) (CDCF) was formally established as a nonprofit corporation with the Texas Secretary of State. The CDCF is not a replacement for Open Source Catholic, and it is not a takeover of anyone's project. It is an attempt to give structure and continuity to the kind of work this community has been doing informally for years. It provides a legal home, a governance framework, peer review, and the kind of institutional scaffolding that lets open source projects outlive the enthusiasm of their original authors. A certificate of formation may sound dry, but in practice it is the difference between a project that depends on one person's calendar and a project that can accept donations, sign agreements, welcome contributors under a clear license, and still be there in ten years. |
| 35 | + |
| 36 | +There is another role, though, that I think the CDCF is uniquely positioned to play — one that Open Source Catholic on its own has never quite been able to take on — and that is the role of a bridge between Catholic developers and the Church's own institutions and hierarchy. Too often, worthy projects have quietly stalled not because the work was poor but because of a simple lack of communication and mutual understanding between developers of good will and the Church offices that carry the responsibility of governing Catholic data. A foundation with a clear governance structure, a recognizable legal identity, and a manifesto rooted in the Church's own tradition is something a diocesan office or an episcopal conference can actually talk to. Together, in the spirit of a synodal Church, we can be attentive to the real potential the digital realm holds for the Church's evangelizing mission, while also discerning and safeguarding against the risks that technology can pose — defending always the value and the dignity of the human person, and encouraging solidarity and subsidiarity among local Catholic communities. |
| 37 | + |
| 38 | +If you read the [CDCF manifesto](https://catholicdigitalcommons.org/manifesto), the continuity with what Open Source Catholic has always stood for is immediate. Technology in the service of the human person, made in the image of God. Open, inspectable, accountable systems. A preference for tools that can be shared over tools that can be sold. A memory of the Church's long tradition of preserving and translating knowledge — the scriptoria, the universities, the catechisms — and an awareness that the same work has to be done today, in the language of code and protocols and APIs. |
| 39 | + |
| 40 | +## Shared ideals |
| 41 | + |
| 42 | +The ideals that the CDCF articulates are the same ones that I have seen written, in one form or another, in countless threads in this community over the years: |
| 43 | + |
| 44 | +- That Catholic software should be **open by default**, so that parishes, dioceses, and developers anywhere in the world can use, inspect, and adapt it without asking permission or paying rent. |
| 45 | +- That the **person is the subject**, not the data — systems should serve the human being, not the other way around. |
| 46 | +- That **transparency, accountability, and inclusion** are not just contemporary buzzwords but specifications of what it means to build things in a Christian way. |
| 47 | +- That **knowledge belongs to the community**, and that building in the commons is a practical expression of the early Church's intuition that believers held things in common. |
| 48 | + |
| 49 | +The value of the CDCF, as I see it, is that it takes these shared ideals and gives them a place to live beyond any one of us. |
| 50 | + |
| 51 | +## An appeal to Catholic developers |
| 52 | + |
| 53 | +If you have been reading along in this community for years without ever opening an issue or a pull request, this is the moment. If you have a project sitting in a personal repo that you have always thought could be useful to someone else, this is the moment. If you are a student learning to code and wondering how your faith has anything to do with it, this is the moment. |
| 54 | + |
| 55 | +Come and join the Catholic Devs slack — either through the [CDCF community page](https://catholicdigitalcommons.org/community) or via the [Open Source Catholic chat page](https://www.opensourcecatholic.com/chat/). Look at the projects the CDCF is already hosting and at the [governance documents](https://catholicdigitalcommons.org/governance) that describe how new projects can be vetted and adopted. Bring your own work. Bring your questions. Bring your particular expertise, whether you write Rust, translate between languages, design interfaces, or simply know where the documentation is weakest. |
| 56 | + |
| 57 | +And if you have — or know of — a Catholic software project that deserves to be seen, please [submit it to the Community Projects page](https://catholicdigitalcommons.org/projects#community-projects). One of the things the CDCF can do, that individual contributors working in isolation cannot, is pool resources and give visibility to the quiet, faithful work that so many Catholic developers are already doing around the world. The more of that work we can gather in one place, the easier it becomes for the next person to find it, build on it, and contribute back. |
| 58 | + |
| 59 | +Open Source Catholic has always been, at its best, a gathering of people who believed that the Gospel and good software are not strangers to each other. The Catholic Digital Commons Foundation is the next step in making that conviction durable. The invitation is open. |
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