Traveling for Holy Week? Trying to find opportunities for confession and adoration? Or returning to Mass and yearning to reconnect with the Lord on Easter Sunday?

Chances are your search will lead to CatholicMassTimes.com, the largest database of Catholic churches and Mass times in the world. There is a good reason: The app — launched in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2013 — currently has information on nearly 114,000 churches all over the world, with more than 1.9 million downloads.

The free app has become a trusted, go-to source, helping the Catholic faithful find a local Mass more than 250,000 times each month. Catholic Mass Times strives for accuracy, regularly updating parishes’ data between 5,000 and 7,000 times per month, while also relying on user feedback for revisions, also known as “crowdsourcing.”

This work has not gone unnoticed. Catholic Mass Times has received widespread acclaim from prominent Catholic users like Father Mike Schmitz, host of The Bible in a Year and The Catechism in a Year podcasts; actor David Henrie; Jamie Baxter, founder of Exodus 90; and from Vatican officials.

For Pablo Licheri, the app’s founder and president, the response and growth have been a blessing. He once led software development departments for Argentinian banks. Today, he is not only raising seven children with his wife, Paula, but also focusing on “creating a bridge for [users] to keep their Catholic spiritual life anywhere life takes them,” as he told the Register.

“In most countries of the world, our app is not simply a convenience, but the only way for Catholics to learn about the Mass and Holy Week celebration times, as many parishes do not have updated websites, or they publish the information through different channels that users cannot easily find,” Licheri said.

Licheri spoke with the Register on Catholic Mass Times’ origins, its challenges and rewards, and its future.

Why did you start Catholic Mass Times?

I was in a managerial role and missed programming very much. Also, I was trying to take my spiritual life more seriously and looking for an opportunity to help others.

By that time, I attended a spiritual retreat in which the priest preached about the infinite value of each Holy Mass for the church, the world and the faithful that participate. During those days, the idea of helping more people participate in the Holy Mass using technology started forming in my mind. … My friend suggested I start with a more straightforward idea: an app to find nearby churches and Mass times that would work well in the cellphones available then.

Those devices were not able to browse web pages correctly, basically making the existing parish web pages in our city impossible to navigate. So I developed a simple but very effective native Android app first and, a few months later, a similar version for iPhone that worked smoothly and solved the problem very effectively. I remember my joy at seeing 200 users using the app to go to Mass after some months.

What were the difficulties in the website/app’s development?

I had to learn to code in new languages and use the latest tools required for mobile app development. I also had to design the complete architecture for a startup with almost zero budget. Quite different from my previous experiences! But I enjoyed it very much.

How were you able to grow the app’s database?

I designed the app to be “crowdsourced” from Day One: Users could send us update requests and information about churches from within the app. And data about more churches started coming from all places. First, from nearby cities; then, as users traveled and recommended the app to more people, we started getting data from other countries.

Except for a couple of countries, most data was sent by users through the app or by developers of regional apps that decided to share their data assets with us to join efforts. We tried lots of different approaches, but remember that in most countries, dioceses have very limited personnel and resources. Many of the 3,000-plus dioceses of the world don’t even have websites!

Nowadays, we have proactive processes in place to update the data about churches that have active websites. Some algorithms detect churches that haven’t received updates in a while and ask one of our operators to visit the parish website and manually update or confirm the data. Also, we regularly ask users to do this. A very loyal and active user community has formed around this app.

What have been some of your favorite/most rewarding user reviews?

We receive impactful messages frequently from all over the world. You can get an idea just by reading the app reviews in the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. We have kind users.

One of the most impactful that I remember lately was one young American called Louis who wrote to us that, thanks to the app, he returned to the Church and then decided to enter as a seminarian. One of my favorite reviews was written this year by Father Mike Schmitz, and he even allowed us to publish it on our website homepage. I admire him so much, and I’m very grateful for his generous testimonial.

You recently visited the Vatican and shared the latest about Catholic Mass Times’ growth and opportunities to expand. What was that like?

I traveled to Rome to visit my son Tomás (studying at the Sancta Croce University) and, through a contact, was introduced to Msgr. Lucio Ruiz, responsible for all Vatican websites and internet presence. He received us in his office in Via della Conciliazione. He was very generous with his time, spending more than one hour learning about our project and sharing valuable advice. And I also met with the Pope’s spokesperson that same week. I didn’t ask for a meeting or blessing from the Pope, although I’d have loved to, but I brought him a frame with a map of the world with icons showing just 2% of the churches we currently have in the app. In some continents, you can barely see the land! That is visually impacting.

Catholic Mass Times now has a newsletter blog offering more than simply times for Mass and the sacraments. Why did you add those as app features?

We created the blog primarily for SEO [Search Engine Optimization], which has proven to be an effective strategy, but we don’t plan to grow it to a content powerhouse. Similarly, we started the newsletter mainly to keep users updated about the app’s features, but it has gradually evolved into a global community connected by their faith journey. Users are telling us that they genuinely appreciate the encouraging content we deliver and its honest personal tone, so we may continue growing it as a means of evangelization to help fellow Catholics go deeper in their faith.

What are the next steps for the app? Are there any further developments and/or improvements in the works?

Keeping the Mass times available and updated seems, from a high level, to be a simple problem, but as with almost everything, it is not so simple once you get into the details — and even less simple if you try to do it on a global scale.

We focus on helping Catholics find churches and attend the sacraments there and only add features we can sustain with an excellent service level. We will keep the app simple to use and focused.

We are working on developing features that our users have long desired: saving favorite churches and implementing more advanced search functionality in the app. Later, we’d like to start using AI agents to detect updated Mass times (which would only be useful for the parishes that have updated websites, of course), and, perhaps next year, we could begin providing the information in a format that Siri and other AI assistants can use to guide people to the closest Catholic Mass or confession nearby.

Thanks to this focused approach and the involvement of more than 75,000 users in these 11 years, we have assembled the largest database of Catholic churches and Mass times in the world.

We are adding the indication of a church being a Jubilee pilgrimage site in the “Additional Information” of each church. We are planning to add a filter to be able to locate these churches in your area more easily, but it is not ready yet.

Why continue doing this project?

This is a valuable service for the Church, and it is our way of helping others with the gifts that God has given us. The app has reached almost 2 million people, but we still have millions more to serve.

Although we have many more churches to add to it, our goal is to keep doing this to make finding the sacraments as easy as opening your phone for all of God’s sons and daughters — anytime, anywhere.