About the library
A free Catholic library of libraries: a selected reading room and a curated resource index, with links to original Church sources and digital libraries. Coverage is selective, not exhaustive.
What is here
The library has four parts. The reading room holds 58 classic texts you can read on this site. The author pages (476 authors), the saints guide (185 saints), the edition guides, and the reading lists are our own curated shelves. The Isidore Index catalogues 6,633 books in the St. Isidore e-book library (isidore.co). The section pages, such as Scripture, Church Documents, and Digital Libraries, point to the Church’s own documents and the great Catholic digital libraries.
Where the texts come from
Every hosted text is a public-domain edition from a known source, usually Project Gutenberg. We keep the original file, a snapshot of its catalogue record, and its SHA-256 checksum, so anyone can check that the text has not been changed, and each reader page shows the source edition, its translator where known, and its license notice. Our rule is to host only texts first published before 1931, in an edition or translation its source lists as public domain in the United States. The rule applies to the text, not always to the printing that was transcribed: a file can come from a later reprint of an earlier text, for example a 1934 reprint of a 1908 book. For some hosted editions our records do not yet note the year of the specific translation; we are adding that evidence. Later works are linked at their publishers or libraries, never copied.
Licensing and credits
The site’s code is under the MIT License, the open data is dedicated to the public domain under CC0, and the writing on these pages is under CC BY 4.0. Hosted texts carry no license from us: they are public domain in the United States, and each keeps its source’s notice. Author excerpts from Wikipedia are shortened and shared under CC BY-SA 4.0, and each portrait is credited on its author page. The details are in our licensing note, a summary rather than legal advice.
Our name
Bibliotheca Catholica (bibliothecacatholica.com) is an independent project. It is not affiliated with IntraText’s “Bibliotheca Catholica” collection (intratext.com) or with Minha Biblioteca Católica (bibliotecacatolica.com.br), and it does not speak for them.
Rights badges
Every record carries one of five rights badges: public domain (US), open license, permission granted, link only, or unknown, with its evidence and the date it was checked. Download and reader buttons appear only for the first three. A rights holder who wants a text or link removed can follow the takedown process.
Editorial policy
Bibliotheca Catholica intends to be faithful to the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. Listing a book is not endorsement: some records in the Isidore Index carry calm, factual context notes, and they are never featured. The Fidelity & Editorial Policy explains this and includes the privacy notice.
Goals
To make the Catholic tradition easy to find and pleasant to read: clean editions, honest sources, careful rights checks, and links that lead back to the libraries that did the work. The catalogue is also published as open data for anyone to reuse.
Help the library
The library is independent and has no ads. You can support the library, suggest a correction, or offer commentary from the Support page. To follow the project, see X, Bluesky, and the Newsletter on Substack.