About FidesHunt
Faith software gets built over and over by people who never find out that the thing they need already exists. This is a list of what exists, ranked by the people who have actually used it.
The name
Fides is faith — the word both halves of the Western church kept. Catholics have fides et ratio, faith and reason; the Reformation has sola fide, faith alone. It is one of the few pieces of Latin neither tradition concedes to the other, which makes it the right word for a directory that would like to be useful to both.
And hunt because that is the actual activity. Anselm called it fides quaerens intellectum — faith seeking understanding — about a thousand years before anyone had a search box.
Two tracks
Products are finished software: prayer apps, breviaries, formation programmes, parish tools, journalism, AI assistants. Things you use.
APIs are what those are built from: liturgical calendars, scripture, the Catechism, canon law, datasets, libraries, MCP servers. Things you build with.
They share one voting system, one submission queue and one JSON API, because they are the same question asked twice — is this any good, and is it maintained?
What gets listed
On the product side: anything a believer actually uses that is software. On the developer side: anything you can build on. Free and paid both qualify — a service that charges honestly is more useful than an abandoned free one. What doesn't qualify: scrapers of sites that forbid scraping, endpoints that quietly re-serve someone else's copyrighted translation, and anything whose only real feature is a landing page.
Where the catalogue actually stands: it is deepest by far on the Catholic side — liturgical calendars, the Catechism, canon law, the Roman Martyrology, canonical identifier registries. That is where the work has gone so far, and it is not a claim that nothing else belongs here. Anything a Christian builds or uses is in scope, and if the Protestant and Orthodox shelves look thin it is because nobody has filled them yet. Fix that.
How ranking works
Top rated sorts by the lower bound of a Wilson confidence interval, not by upvotes minus downvotes. Raw net score would let a listing with 400 up and 380 down beat one with 40 up and 1 down, which is backwards — the second is plainly better, we are just less certain. Wilson asks the fairer question: given the votes so far, what is the lowest plausible approval rate? Small unanimous listings rank well, and rank better still as votes accumulate.
Trending counts votes from the last two weeks, decayed by how long the listing has been here, so new arrivals get a chance to be seen. Newest and A–Z do what they say.
Voting
No account needed — an anonymous, signed cookie tracks your votes so you can change your mind. Click the same arrow twice to take a vote back. There's a per-IP rate limit to make ballot-stuffing tedious, though nothing here is fraud-proof and it isn't trying to be.
Vote on whether the thing is good: does it work, is it maintained, is it documented, does it do what it claims? Not on whether you like the maker's theology.
Sources and prior art
This directory did not start from nothing. Most of it came from people who were cataloguing Catholic software long before it existed, and every listing they gave us says so and links back.
- The Catholic Digital Commons Foundation publishes under the CatholicOS organisation — including its canonical-identifier registries for the fixed sets Catholic software keeps re-keying by hand: dioceses, popes, councils, Doctors, liturgical books, magisterial documents. Those are here as first-party listings, mostly under Apache 2.0.
- CatholicOS/awesome-catholic — the foundation's curated list of everyone else's work, and the source of the idea that dead projects belong in an “Attic” rather than the bin. No licence is stated on the repository, so we took only the facts — what a project is called, where it lives, which section it sat in — and wrote our own descriptions.
- servusdei2018/awesome-catholic — released under CC0 1.0, which makes reuse unambiguous. More lists should do this.
Where the two lists disagreed — one retiring a project the other still recommends — we kept the retirement and recorded the disagreement on the listing, because a false alive costs more than a false dead.
If you maintain a list we've missed, or you'd rather your entries weren't here, tell us.
Deprecation and uptime
A scheduled job walks the directory every few hours, least-recently-checked first, and asks each listing's homepage whether it is still there. One failure is not a verdict — sites time out and firewalls get twitchy — so a listing is only shown as not responding after three consecutive failures. A 403 or 405 doesn't count against it at all: that is a server refusing us, not a server that is down.
Deprecation is a separate, human judgement. Anything abandoned, superseded or plainly dead is flagged not live any more — and then stays published. Deleting it would only send the next person round the same search you just finished. Every listing has a one-click report as deprecated button; enough reports and a moderator looks.
It runs the other way too. Projects come back — a maintainer returns, someone forks it, a domain gets renewed — so every flagged listing carries an it's working again button, and a moderator can lift the flag. A directory that can mark things dead but never undo it is just a slower kind of wrong.
Data and corrections
Listings are compiled from public documentation and project READMEs. Fields we haven't confirmed say so rather than guessing — an unverified blank is more honest than a wrong label. Every listing shows when a maintainer last verified it, and every listing has a report button. Use it: links rot, projects get abandoned, and pricing changes.
Nothing here is affiliated with the Holy See, any bishops' conference, or any diocese. Check each publisher's own terms before you ship — especially for scripture translations, where the licensing is the hard part.
The directory has an API
It would be a poor showing not to. Both tracks are available as JSON at https://fideshunt.com/api/v1, CORS open, no key required.