How I Write

Catholic Index is built by Mike Chang, a software engineer and Catholic convert. Everything on this site — the data pipeline, the blog posts, the fact-checking system — is one person with good tools. This page explains what those tools are and how they work.

The data

Catholic Index tracks schedules for over 23,000 churches in the United States and 5,500 in Canada. Mass times, confession schedules, adoration hours, and livestream links — sourced from parish websites, diocesan directories, and published bulletins. I collect, parse, and update this data regularly.

Parish schedules are messy. A church might list confession as "30 minutes before every weekday Mass" or "by appointment." Untangling that into something searchable takes a mix of automated parsing and manual review. When I get it wrong, let me know — corrections are usually live within a day.

The blog

My blog posts are data journalism — stories that start with queries against my parish database and end with sourced, cited articles. I use AI models throughout: for data analysis, drafting, research, and editing. One person cannot manually process 23,000 parish schedules into a coherent article. AI makes it possible to cover every parish, not just the big ones.

This is not unusual. Most digital newsrooms use AI tools in some part of their workflow — for transcription, research, translation, or draft generation. The Catholic Media Association's 2025 guidelines and the Vatican's Antiqua et Nova both support AI as a tool that complements human work. That is how I use it.

Reference content

Some pages on this site answer questions about Catholic teaching — sacraments, moral theology, liturgical practice. These are sourced directly from Church documents: the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Code of Canon Law, Vatican encyclicals, and documents from the USCCB and CCCB. Every answer cites its source by paragraph, canon number, or document title.

AI assists with research and drafting, but the standard is the same as the blog: no claim without a verifiable source. If I say the Church teaches something, I link to where the Church actually says it.

How I check it

AI-assisted writing can get things wrong. I know this because I built a fact-checking system specifically to catch it. Every blog post goes through multiple specialized review passes before publication:

• 1.Names and titles — every person, diocese, and institution is verified against official sources. A diocese is not an archdiocese. A cardinal is not a bishop. I check.
• 2.Numbers and math — every percentage, ratio, and statistic is recomputed from the underlying data. If I say 78%, I can show you 4,382 divided by 5,590.
• 3.Sources — every external link is fetched and confirmed. The page has to exist, and it has to say what I claim it says.
• 4.Catholic theology — liturgical terminology, canon law citations, and sacramental descriptions are checked against Church documents. I cite the canon number.
• 5.Dates and geography — event timelines, founding dates, and geographic claims are verified against published records.
• 6.Consistency — if I cite the same statistic in two articles, it has to be the same number. Tables have to add up. Stat cards have to match the text.
• 7.Source fidelity — if I tell a story from a cited source, the story has to match what the source actually says. Not just cite it — represent it accurately.

Every correction must include verifiable evidence — a URL, a recomputed number, a canon citation. If I cannot independently verify a proposed fix, I do not apply it. This rule exists because AI fact-checkers can hallucinate corrections just as confidently as AI writers can hallucinate facts.

What I get wrong

I'll get things wrong. Parish schedules change. Sources get updated. My parsing misreads a bulletin. A fact-checker misses something. When that happens, I correct it. If you find an error in any of my content — a wrong Mass time, a misquoted source, a number that does not add up — please tell me.

Every blog post includes a full sources section at the bottom. You can check my work.