The home of the Common Roman Curia Data Repository, curated by the Catholic Engineering Task Force of the Catholic Digital Commons Foundation.
The Common Roman Curia Data Repository (CRCDR) provides canonical identifiers (cr:) for the bodies of the Roman Curia and the institutions connected with the Holy See, together with each body's dated names, kinds and places in the Curia, and the events (foundation, rename, merger, split, suppression, …) that changed them.
It does for curial bodies what CRPDR does for popes and COECDR for councils: it enumerates a closed set and gives each member an identifier that never changes.
Magisterial and curial documents are issued by bodies of the Roman Curia: Fiducia Supplicans by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (2023), Donum Veritatis by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (1990). Today nothing identifies those issuers stably. Curial bodies are renamed, merged, split, suppressed and re-founded, so an identifier built on today's name misattributes every earlier document and has no answer for bodies that were merged away.
CRCDR gives each body one identifier, and records enough history that for any (name, date) pair the registry says which body is meant. It tracks CatholicOS/cdcf-uri-scheme#20 and unblocks curial issuers in the URI scheme (#16) and in CMDDR.
cr:<latin-slug>-<founding-year>
The long form is curia-romana:; the short form is canonical. The slug follows the Latin name in the nominative, with the generic kind words (Dicasterium, Congregatio, Sacra, …) and the governing pro/de dropped. The year is the year the founding act took effect, always present, because two different bodies have borne the same name. The key is minted once, from the name in use when it is minted; later renames go only into the dated names list. As a regex: ^cr:[a-z]+(?:-[a-z]+)*-[0-9]{4}$ (lower-case ASCII letters, ASCII digits).
Examples, taken from the data:
| Body | Identifier |
|---|---|
| Inquisition → Holy Office → CDF → DDF | cr:doctrina-fidei-1542 |
| Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship, 1969–1975 | cr:cultus-divinus-1969 |
| Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship, created 1984 | cr:cultus-divinus-1984 |
| Apostolic Penitentiary (year provisional) | cr:paenitentiaria-apostolica-1256 |
| Index of Forbidden Books, ended 1917 (year provisional) | cr:index-1571 |
The identity rules (what keeps an identifier, what mints a new one) and the full data model are in docs/schema-proposal.md. All IDs are drafts pending committee review.
Every body that, at any time since Sixtus V's Immensa Aeterni Dei (1588), has belonged to the Roman Curia, together with the Pontifical Academies and the institutions connected with the Holy See; bodies founded earlier that existed in 1588, such as the Holy Office (1542), are included.
Phase 1 (this release) covers 64 bodies and 126 events. Held out of phase 1:
- 9 bodies whose founding year could not be secured (no year is guessed): the Apostolic Camera, the Secretariat of State, the Apostolic Briefs, the Briefs to Princes, the Apostolic Chancery, the Apostolic Datary, the Signatura Gratiae, the Ceremonial and the Papal Almonry. The evidence and next source for each is in
seed/founding_years.json. state-of-regulars, because the research record conflates two bodies (1652 and 1847).- Two out-of-scope records:
sixtine-temporal-congregations(one record standing for six bodies; phase 2) andfabric-st-peter(an institution connected with the Holy See; phase 2).
The Pontifical Academies, the institutions connected with the Holy See and Sixtus V's Papal States congregations are phase 2.
kindis what the act calls the body (congregation,council,pontifical-council,secretariat,commission,committee,dicastery,tribunal,office,prefecture,academy,institution). The Latin term governs; English translations vary.sectionis where the governing constitution of the period places the body, grouped by regime (pre-1588,immensa-1588,sapienti-consilio-1908,cic-1917,reu-1968,pastor-bonus-1989,praedicate-evangelium-2022). Each section value declares whether it isin_curia.
Both are dated intervals (from inclusive, to exclusive), so a body can change kind or section without changing identifier.
Whether a body's documents bind, and how much, belongs to CMDDR, where authority attaches to the act, not to the issuer. CRCDR records what a body was and where it sat, and nothing more. It does not list the documents a body issued, and does not infer teaching weight from kind.
data/bodies.json: the bodies, with dated names, kinds, sections and part-of relations, each fact carryingverified,source_typeand a source.data/events.json: the events that changed them, each tied to its act, with the operative clause where transcribed.data/kinds.json,data/sections.json,data/event_types.json: the controlled vocabularies.data/identifiers.json: generated; ids, dated names and aliases (lookup is by name and date), predecessor/successor links andmag:references.registry/bodies.mdandregistry/lineages.md: the human-readable registry and per-lineage tables. Generated, never hand-edited.docs/schema-proposal.md: identity rules, data model, open questions and the Latinist review list.docs/curia-history-report.md: the research report behind the seed.seed/: the research files and the curated maps (keys, events, kinds, founding years, name fixes) used to seed the data.scripts/:crcdr.py(shared helpers),validate.py,generate_registry.py,seed_from_research.pyand their tests. Python 3, standard library only; run every script from the repository root withpython3 -I.
python3 -I -m unittest discover -s scripts -v
python3 -I scripts/validate.py
python3 -I scripts/generate_registry.pyThe Annuario Pontificio is the authority for the content of this registry, and it has not been consulted: it is not published online. The seed comes from the research in docs/curia-history-report.md, with founding years researched separately. Every fact carries verified and source_type (primary, official-secondary, secondary or inferred), and seeding never upgrades either. In the registry, † marks a fact recorded verified: false, ‡ a fact carrying a documented research gap, and ⁱ an event (or a founding or ending) recorded inferred: true. The early years in particular need checking: the medieval Penitentiary 1256 and Rota 1323, both from secondary sources; Visitation 1637, an attested year rather than a founding act; and Revision of Councils 1849, from one secondary sentence.
The validator reports errors (inconsistencies; must be zero) and warnings: every documented research gap (each fact carrying a gap note), dated facts with no source, and operative clauses not yet transcribed. The warnings are documented gaps, not defects, and are listed in registry/bodies.md.
Corrections against the Annuario and against the acts themselves are the most useful contribution this repository can receive.
data/identifiers.jsonis licensed under CC0 1.0. SeeLICENSE-CC0.- The rest of the data, the registry, the documentation and
seed/(the research data and curated maps) are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-ND 4.0). SeeLICENSE. - The source code in
scripts/andseed/research/build_curia.pyis licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Seescripts/LICENSE.