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What this is

Glossa Catholica is a reading site for Scripture and texts of the Catholic Church. Nothing is asked of you for reading it:

  • Free. No paywall, no subscription, nothing to pay.
  • No advertising, and no sponsored placement of any kind.
  • No accounts. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to log in to.
  • No tracking scripts, no third-party code, no cookies. Anonymous usage counts only, with nothing that identifies you.
  • Built to keep working offline once you have downloaded its texts, so a poor connection need not be a barrier to reading.

Glossa Catholica is a private undertaking of the lay faithful. It carries no ecclesiastical approbation and speaks with no authority of its own.

St. Isidore of Seville, author of Etymologiae and “patron of the Internet”

The texts

Every text comes from a named source, and every work records its edition, its source page and the date it was retrieved. The Catechism, the Code and the magisterial documents come from the Holy See’s own published texts.

The text is never abridged, never paraphrased, never rewritten, and never placed beside advertising. We do repair plain defects — a dropped word, a mangled citation, markup that swallowed a paragraph — always toward what the source itself prints, never toward what we think it should say.

The interface reaches further than the library does. Where a work has no edition in the language you are reading in, it is shown in the nearest language that has one, usually English, and it always names the edition you are reading.

13 Bible editions · 455 magisterial documents

The illustrations

The pictures stand at the verse each one depicts: Gustave Doré’s engravings in the Bible, the day’s readings and the stories, James Tissot’s watercolors on a scene Doré did not draw, and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld’s woodcuts on one neither of them drew.

They are in the public domain, as the dates below show. A faithful photographic reproduction of a public-domain picture carries no new copyright of its own — the rule of Article 14 of the EU copyright directive, and of Bridgeman v. Corel in the United States.

241 pictures· 201 chapters illustrated

Doré's Illustrations for La Grande Bible de Tours. Gustave Doré (1832-1883), La Grande Bible de Tours (Alfred Mame et fils, Tours, 1866). The Doré Bible Illustrations (Dover Publications, 1974).
Images provided by Rev. Felix Just, S.J.

240 pictures

Schnorr von Carolsfeld's Die Bibel in Bildern. Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1794-1872), Die Bibel in Bildern (Georg Wigand, Leipzig, 1852-1860). The Getty Research Institute's copy.
Images provided by the Internet Archive

286 pictures

James Tissot's The Life of Our Saviour Jesus Christ. James Tissot (1836-1902), The Life of Our Saviour Jesus Christ (1886-1894). Brooklyn Museum, purchased by public subscription, 00.159.
Images provided by the Brooklyn Museum

The type

Set in EB Garamond, Georg Duffner and Octavio Pardo’s revival of Claude Garamont’s types as the Egenolff–Berner specimen showed them in 1592. Its Cyrillic is by the same hands but revives nothing: no Garamond Cyrillic was ever cut, so Cyrillic text is set in a form drawn to sit beside the rest.

Arabic is beyond it altogether, and is set in Amiri — Khaled Hosny’s revival of the naskh type of the Bulaq press in Cairo in the early twentieth century, chosen on the same reasoning as the text face: a particular historical book type rather than a contemporary drawing.

The opening initials are Pirata One, a blackletter whose capitals stay legible at the size a drop cap demands, and — for Russian and Belarusian — Ponomar, which reproduces the Church Slavonic type of the Synodal Press. Ponomar sets the initial and never the text: a modern encyclical set throughout in Synodal type would say something untrue about what it is. All are licensed under the SIL Open Font License and served from this site rather than from a third party, so reading a page asks nothing of anyone else’s server.

Privacy

Nothing here follows you off this site.

We count how the site is used: one measurement per visit, every field a range rather than a value — how long you stayed, how often you have been here, which works you opened. Your country is counted separately, with nothing joining it to the rest. It describes a visit, not a visitor, and is kept for 400 days. You can switch it off for this device under Advanced in the settings menu.

Never sent: what you type into the search box, which passage you had open, or anything that could recognize your device again. Your settings, bookmarks and downloaded texts stay on your device.

The texts here that are not in the public domain are the property of their rights holders — principally the Libreria Editrice Vaticana and the Dicastery for Communication.

Each work displays its rights holder’s own copyright notice, in their wording, and links to the page it was taken from.

If you hold rights in any text here and would rather it were not published, write to us.

Participate

Write to us if:

  • you have found a defect.
  • you hold the rights to a text you think belongs here, and would let it be published.

Contact

For anything at all, including the above: curator@glossacatholica.org