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Why Another Mass Times Website?
There are dozens of mass times aggregators. Here's why I built Catholic Index anyway - and what I'm doing differently.
December 31, 20257 min read|By Mike Chang
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Judas conspires to betray the Lord. Examine your own heart and draw closer to Christ.
There are dozens of mass times aggregators. Here's why I built Catholic Index anyway - and what I'm doing differently.
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My first homepage in '97 was about myself. This one isn't, and it shouldn't be. But Catholic Index deserves a why.
A few years after my conversion I started pulling in parish data, just to see what the Catholic Church in America actually looked like.
What I found was fascinating. 78% of Canadian parishes publish no confession times at all. Only 3% of Christmas Eve Masses start after 11 PM — midnight Mass is quietly disappearing. I analyzed 209,000 livestreamed Masses and found the median homily runs 21 minutes, nearly triple what the Pope suggests. The deeper I looked, the more I saw: schedules buried in PDF bulletins, times listed as "30 minutes before every Mass," formats that change parish to parish. I wondered if anyone was looking at the Church this way. I realized that if the data was this messy for a researcher, it was likely impossible for a seeker.
I should say why this is personal. I'm a Catholic convert. I came in through OCIA, and my director gave me a tip that stuck with me: if you feel awkward going to Confession at your own parish, just go to a different one. I filed that away. Then AI came along, and I realized my powers multiplied. And I kept coming back to the same question: what's more important than helping people keep showing up to Confession?
Then I started volunteering with an existing directory site, and I saw how hard the problem really is from the inside. Parishes change schedules for summer, for holy days, when a priest retires. The data drifts out of date quietly, and nobody notices until someone shows up at the wrong time. I kept thinking, this could use some love.
That question became Catholic Index. Today it covers over 100,000 parishes across 8 countries, and it's still just me. Here's why it exists, and what I'm trying to do differently.
Every Catholic parish publishes its own schedule, in its own format, on its own website. Confession times live on a separate page. Adoration hours only appear in the weekly bulletin. Some parishes list times that only make sense if you already know the Mass schedule. Seasonal changes flip everything twice a year.
Now multiply that across 18,000 US parishes. Then add Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, Spain, and Germany.
Volunteer-run directories have tried to solve this for over a decade. The people behind them are incredible — they genuinely care about the Church. But the task is structurally impossible to maintain by hand. Formats change, pages move, bulletins get re-uploaded. I've seen Facebook complaints from 2014 about outdated confession times on the same directories that are still outdated today. Software should be doing this.
Catholic Index checks the source directly — parish websites, bulletins, PDFs — and extracts what it finds. It's not perfect, but it builds on what volunteers started.
One thing you discover when you are deep in the Church's data: when a national event hit the news, I could see how parishes across the country responded — diocese by diocese, aligned with the bishop. You don't get that view from a sample.
Some mornings I wake up and check the candle wall — a feature where people can light virtual prayer candles with intentions. Strangers praying for sick parents, struggling marriages, job interviews.
It reminds me this isn't just a data project. Someone is driving to mass this Sunday because they found the right time here. Someone made it to confession because the hours were actually accurate.
That's worth doing right, even if it's slow, even if there are already a dozen other sites, even if nobody notices.
Accuracy and completeness first. I want the data to be right — not just mass times, but confession, adoration, special events, dated events, and seasonal changes.
Serve parishes, not burden them. If a directory creates more work for parish staff, it's failed. My job is to read what you've already published, not ask you to update another system.
That sounds obvious, but it's actually the hard part. Aggregating is easy. Keeping it accurate without creating work for parishes is not.
This isn't glamorous work. But I kind of feel like God's telling me to keep going.
This isn't a "set it and forget it" site. It's a living map. If you see a stale schedule, you aren't just correcting a website — you're helping the next person who shows up at that church door.
If you find an error, tell me. I'll fix it. And if this helped you get to Mass or Confession on time, that's the whole point.