What This Library Is

This is a small library about the Catholic faith: short articles on prayer, the sacraments, the Mass, Scripture, the Creed, the moral life, the saints and the history of the Church. Each one is meant to be read in a few minutes, by anyone, whether you have been Catholic all your life, are finding your way back, or have never set foot in a church. It tries to say clearly what the Church teaches, to show where that teaching comes from, and to point you to the next thing worth reading.

What it is not

A website cannot baptise you, absolve you, or give you the Body of Christ. The faith is lived in a community, around an altar, with real people and a real priest, and nothing here is a substitute for that. The Church calls the parish the ordinary place where the faithful gather for the Eucharist, are taught, and practise charity together (CCC 2179). A parish is a local Catholic community, usually defined by an area, with its own church and pastor.

So if a question here touches your own life, especially your conscience, your marriage, or whether you may receive a sacrament, please take it to a priest. Articles can explain the general shape of things; they cannot know your situation. And if you are reading late at night because something is weighing on you, the best next step may not be another article at all, but a conversation, or a confession, or simply going to Mass this Sunday.

How it is organised

The library is arranged in collections, each a group of related articles: Getting Started, Prayer, The Sacraments, The Mass, Scripture, The Creed, The Moral Life, The Saints, Church History, and Using the Catechism. The home page shows them all, with a line about each.

On a wide screen, the sidebar on the left lists every collection and its articles, so you can always see where you are. On a phone it folds away into a menu. Inside an article, the panel headed On this page lists its sections and follows you as you scroll; click a heading to jump to it. At the foot of each article are links to the previous and next pieces, so you can read a collection straight through like a short book.

To find something quickly, use search. Press Ctrl+K (or ⌘K on a Mac), or tap the search button in the top bar, and start typing: "rosary", "confession", "Nicene", "purgatory". Search looks at article titles, section headings and the one-line summary of each article.

How sources are cited

Every claim of doctrine should rest on something you can check. Most of what is said here comes from the Catechism of the Catholic Church (the CCC), the official summary of Catholic teaching published in 1992. It is divided into numbered paragraphs, and we cite those numbers in brackets, like this: (CCC 2559). Any edition, printed or online, uses the same numbering, so you can look a paragraph up for yourself. We paraphrase the Catechism rather than quote it at length, and quote only a phrase or a sentence where the exact words matter.

Scripture is cited by book, chapter and verse, with full book names: (Matthew 6:9–13). Where we quote the Bible, the wording is that of the Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition (RSV). "Cf." before a reference means "compare": the passage supports the point without saying it in so many words. If you want the larger picture of how the Catechism is laid out, see what the Catechism is and how to read it.

What "awaiting review" means

At the top of each article you will see a notice that it is awaiting review. Every article in the library is waiting to be read by a priest, who will check it for accuracy and for tone. We have tried hard to say only what the Church says, and to cite carefully, but until that review is done, treat each page as a well-meant draft. If you spot a mistake, it is a mistake of ours, not of the Church. When an article has been reviewed, the notice will change to say so.

Why St Carlo Acutis

The library is named for St Carlo Acutis, an Italian teenager born in 1991 who loved the Eucharist and used his skill with computers to build a website cataloguing Eucharistic miracles from around the world. He died of leukaemia on 12 October 2006, aged 15, was beatified in 2020, and was canonised on 7 September 2025. You can read more about him in St Carlo Acutis.

He showed that the web could be a place where people meet the faith. That is the whole hope of this small library.

Going deeper

• If you are new: a gentle first path for someone just beginning.
• If you are returning: for anyone coming back after time away.
• What the Catechism is: the book behind most of our citations.
• To read next in the Catechism: the Prologue (CCC 1–25), on why the Church hands on the faith at all.