Data Transparency | Catholic Parish Dataset

Why we built it

OrgFire is built for parishes and dioceses, and a shared map of who's who turned out to be the foundation the rest of it stands on. We built it, and keep it current, for a few reasons:

To coordinate records. When a sacrament, a family, or a request moves between parishes, both sides need to agree on which parish is which.
To speed up onboarding. A parish joining OrgFire starts from a listing that's already filled in, not a blank form.
To help the community. Anyone can look up a parish, its diocese, and how to reach it, in one place.
And because the history is fascinating. The Catholic Church in America is centuries of parishes founded, merged, renamed, and rebuilt, and we think that's genuinely worth mapping.

Where the data comes from

Parish and diocese websites. Public pages for contact details, Mass times, and clergy, cross-checked against each diocese's own list of its parishes.
Google Places. The starting point for locations and basic contact information.
Parishes themselves. Parishes on OrgFire keep their own listing current, and those updates are the most authoritative source of all.

We don't pull from the Official Catholic Directory or any other paywalled source.

Keeping it current

We refresh from public sources about once a month, and parishes on OrgFire update live. Every record carries the time it was last updated and a stable identifier that never changes, even if a parish closes, merges, or is renamed, so you can always tell how fresh a detail is and follow a parish through its history.

The data-quality score

Every entry carries a 0–100 score so you can see at a glance how much we know about it. It blends two public signals: how many independent sources agree on the record, and how complete its public details are (address, phone, email, a working website, diocese, and founding year). Internal notes never factor into it.

Because the registry is still being built, plenty of scores are low today. They climb as we verify entries against more sources and fill in missing fields, so a sparse page now becomes a fuller one later.

Help us tell the story

A registry can hold more than addresses. So much of a parish's history, when it was founded, the parish it grew out of or merged into, the fire in '64, the photo in someone's grandmother's album, lives only in memory and basement files, and is quietly lost when a parish closes. We'd like to help keep it.

Know something about a parish, or spot something wrong? Email [email protected] with a story, a correction, a date, or a photo, and we'll add it with care.