Open data
Everything that parishioners and parish staff add to LocalMass is open data. You can download the full data set or query it with a free API. Use it in a parish app, a diocesan site, research, or a map.
- churches
- 14,607
- with times
- 697
- services
- 5,456
- attribute facts
- 308
License
The data set is under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0. Church locations come from OpenStreetMap, which uses the same license. You may copy, change, and use the data, also for commercial use, if you:
- Give credit: “Data from LocalMass.org contributors and © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL”, with a link to this page.
- Share a changed or extended copy of the database under the ODbL.
Always tell your users to confirm times with the parish. Schedules change, and crowd data can be wrong.
Download
A new copy is published every night to the localmass-data repository on GitHub. Each night is a commit, so the history shows every change.
- churches.csv
- One row per church: location, contact, diocese, affiliation, rite, and verification.
- services.csv
- One row per Mass, confession, adoration, or other service, with the church id.
- attributes.csv
- Crowd consensus on each attribute (for example orientation or Communion practice), with status, confidence, and votes.
- localmass.json
- The full data set as nested JSON: churches with their services and attributes.
- churches.geojson
- Church points for maps and GIS tools, with schedule counts.
API
The API is free and needs no key. It returns JSON and allows requests from any website (CORS). The limit is 120 requests per minute for each IP address. For the full data set, use the nightly files.
GET https://localmass.org/api/v1
GET https://localmass.org/api/v1/churches?state=OH&city=columbus
GET https://localmass.org/api/v1/churches?near=39.96,-83.00&radius_km=10&tlm=1
GET https://localmass.org/api/v1/churches/{id-or-slug}/api/v1 lists the endpoints, live counts, and every code used in the data (service types, forms, languages, affiliations, rites, and attribute values).
Parameters for /api/v1/churches
- state
- Two-letter state code, for example OH.
- city
- City slug, for example columbus. Use it with state.
- near, radius_km
- lat,lng and a radius (default 15 km, maximum 100). Results are in distance order.
- bbox
- minLng,minLat,maxLng,maxLat.
- updated_since
- ISO date. Returns churches whose data changed on or after this time.
- has_schedule=1
- Only churches with at least one service.
- tlm=1
- Only churches with a Traditional Latin Mass.
- affiliation, rite
- Filter by code. The API index lists the codes.
- embed=0
- Leave out services and attributes.
- limit, cursor
- Page size (1 to 500, default 100) and the next_cursor value from the previous page.
What the data contains
- Churches: name, address, coordinates, time zone, phone, website, diocese, affiliation, rite, and whether parish staff verify the listing.
- Services: type, day or date, start and end time (local time of the church), form of the Mass, language, and notes.
- Attributes: what contributors agree on, with a status (official, confirmed, reported, likely, or disputed), a confidence from 0 to 1, and the number of votes.
The data does not contain any information about contributors: no names, accounts, emails, votes, or IP data. See the privacy policy.
Found an error? Correct it on LocalMass. The fix will be in the next nightly copy.
Checking parish websites (LocalMassBot)
To keep times current, LocalMass checks each parish's own website and bulletin about every two weeks. The requests come from LocalMassBot/1.0. It reads only public pages, obeys robots.txt, waits between requests, and never signs in. Each change to a listing records the page it came from and can be undone.
Parish staff: to correct a listing or to ask us not to check your site, contact us or claim your parish. A claimed parish's own edits always come first.