The purpose of The Catholic Library is to assemble a comprehensive collection of public domain Catholic books, articles on Catholic subjects, and official documents of Holy Mother Church, and to present them, free of charge, to the general Internet populace. We hope to make the official documents available in English, in their original language, and in Latin - the language of Holy Mother Church.

Welcome to TheCatholicLibrary.org


St. Jerome
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), ca. 1606

We hope that our site will be easy to navigate, search and browse. If you have problems navigating or accessing material on our site for any reason, please contact us.

Please bear with us though. All of us involved in this website are doing so in our spare time. It may take a couple of months to get some parts of the site set up. In the meantime, we are looking for interested people, especially Latinists, who are willing to donate their time to this project. Please email us at: librarians@thecatholiclibrary.org.

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Venerable Pope Pius XII - Pater Noster

Click to play 0:42 minutes (984.33 KB)

Pope Pius XII prays the Pater Noster.

Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903) - Ave Maria

Click to play 0:45 minutes (354.81 KB)

Pope Leo XIII prays the Ave Maria.

Where Have All the Documents Gone?

I've noticed in the logs that people have been trying to access the papal documents that we had up on the old site. We are working to transfer some of them to this new site. Unfortunately, it seems that the Vatican, for the first time, is enforcing its copyright on papal documents. My understanding is that the Vatican copyright covers documents published within the last 50 years. I therefore am reluctant to put those documents back online unless and until it is clear that our usage of the documents falls under fair use. We shall soon begin to bring back the documents that are more than 50 years old. If you have a specific document you are looking for, please post a comment and let us know.

Welcome to TheCatholicLibrary.org Forum!

I'm amazed that so many people have already signed up for memberships here, when we don't yet have much content up! In response, I've decided to open up -- on a trial basis -- this forum for general discussion. If any of our users would like to introduce themselves publicly, please do so as a response to this topic. We'll open another topic for discussions about (and suggestions for) the website and the project in general.

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