Standards
Verification standards
How a listing gets onto this directory, how it is confirmed, and what each state actually means.
A directory that publishes Mass times carries a plain duty: if we are wrong, somebody drives an hour and finds a locked church. Everything below follows from taking that seriously.
Where listings come from
Most come from official published sources — parish bulletins, diocesan schedules, and institute sites — which we read on a schedule and re-read as they age. Some come from readers. Nothing a reader sends is published as they sent it: it becomes a candidate, and we go and read the official source ourselves before anything changes.
What we do with a source
Every source is classified, and its class carries a weight. That weight decays with the age of the document, rises slightly when several independent sources agree, and is capped whenever anything contradicts it.
Source classes
- Official parish bulletin
- high
- Official diocesan site
- high
- Official institute site
- high
- Verified clergy or administrator
- high
- Official parish social channel
- medium
- Multiple trusted community confirmations
- medium
- Individual unverified submission
- low
- Third-party post
- low
- Old cached page
- low
What each verification state means
- Officially verified
- Confirmed by the parish, institute, or diocese responsible for this location.
- Rechecked every 120 days.
- Source confirmed
- Matched against an official published source such as a bulletin or diocesan page.
- Rechecked every 90 days.
- Community confirmed
- Confirmed by multiple trusted attendees. Not yet confirmed by the responsible authority.
- Rechecked every 45 days.
- Needs confirmation
- We have not been able to confirm this schedule recently. Contact the church before traveling.
- Rechecked every 21 days.
- Temporarily unavailable
- This Mass is suspended or paused. The listing is kept for reference.
- Rechecked every 60 days.
- Archived
- This listing is no longer current and is retained as history.
- Rechecked every 365 days.
What is published automatically, and what is not
A change is published without a person looking at it only when its confidence reaches 90%, which in practice means a recent official source. Everything else goes to a reviewer.
There is one rule with no threshold at all: when two sources disagree, a person decides. However strong the newer source, the system does not pick a winner.
A published time that we cannot read unambiguously is not published at all. A bulletin that says a Mass is at “6” could mean either end of the day, so we refuse it and ask rather than guess.
Planned celebrations
A Mass that has been announced but has not begun is marked as planned and kept out of ordinary search results. It appears on the map as an open ring rather than a lit point. This is so that nobody travels to a date that has not arrived.
What we will not do
- We do not rate or rank priests, parishes, or celebrations, and we do not publish reviews of them.
- We do not let an advertiser influence a verification decision or a listing’s status. Nobody has ever been offered that and nobody ever will be.
- We do not describe a community as legitimate or illegitimate. We state what is documented about its canonical standing, and leave the judgement to you and your pastor.
- We do not delete history. A listing that ends is archived with its sources, not removed.
If we are wrong
Tell us. The people who attend a church know before we do. Find the listing and use the correction link; nothing you send is published under your name.