| --- |
| language: |
| - la |
| - grc |
| - en |
| license: |
| - other |
| license_name: mixed-public-domain-cc |
| tags: |
| - catholic |
| - theology |
| - patristics |
| - scholasticism |
| - latin |
| - greek |
| - church-fathers |
| - nlp |
| - digital-humanities |
| - corpus |
| - religion |
| pretty_name: CatholicCorpus |
| size_categories: |
| - 10K<n<100K |
| task_categories: |
| - text-generation |
| - text-classification |
| - feature-extraction |
| configs: |
| - config_name: default |
| data_files: "**/*" |
| --- |
| |
| # CatholicCorpus |
|
|
| An open-access, NLP-ready corpus of Catholic texts spanning 2,000 years of the Catholic intellectual tradition — from the Church Fathers to the 20th century. |
|
|
| **67,772 content files | 16 collections | 35.9 GB | 2,000 years of coverage** |
|
|
| ## What's In the Corpus |
|
|
| | # | Collection | Content Files | Size | Format | |
| |---|-----------|-----:|-----:|--------| |
| | 01 | Git Repos (CSEL, Aquinas Opera Omnia, Septuagint, Byzantine Text, eBible) | 4,668 | 3.4 GB | TEI XML, TXT | |
| | 02 | Corpus Corporum (Patrologia Latina + 29 Latin/Greek corpora from mlat.uzh.ch) | 29,820 | 4.2 GB | TEI XML | |
| | 03 | Gutenberg (Douay-Rheims, Imitation of Christ, Baltimore Catechism, etc.) | 18 | 9 MB | TXT | |
| | 04 | Direct Downloads (Clementine Vulgate, SBLGNT, Canon Law 1917, Roman Catechism) | 1,244 | 42 MB | TXT, PDF | |
| | 05 | CCEL (Ante-Nicene/Nicene Fathers, Summa Theologiae, devotional classics) | 61 | 691 MB | PDF | |
| | 06 | Catholic Encyclopedia (complete 1913 edition, 15 volumes) | 18 | 1.0 GB | PDF | |
| | 07 | Latin & Franciscan (Anselm, Peter Lombard, Bonaventure, Scotus, Ockham) | 30 | 1.1 GB | PDF | |
| | 08 | Liturgical & Hymns (Divine Office, hymns, pre-1928 papal encyclicals) | 31,141 | 202 MB | HTML, GABC | |
| | 09 | Archive & Misc (Council of Trent, Golden Legend, Butler's Lives, Albert the Great) | 65 | 2.1 GB | PDF | |
| | 11 | Catholic Bible (Douay-Rheims, Haydock annotated Bible, Lapide Commentary) | 12 | 673 MB | PDF | |
| | 12 | English Catholic Thinkers (Newman 33 vols, Chesterton 7, Belloc 5) | 45 | 841 MB | PDF | |
| | 13 | Mystics (Therese, Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena, Ignatius, etc.) | 13 | 182 MB | PDF | |
| | 14 | Liturgical Expansion (Liber Usualis, Missale Romanum, Rituale, Breviarium) | 16 | 2.2 GB | PDF | |
| | 15 | Late Scholastics (Suarez 27 vols, Bellarmine, Cajetan, a Lapide, Banez, Molina) | 42 | 3.9 GB | PDF | |
| | 16 | Patrologia Graeca (159 of 161 Migne PG volumes with OCR text and EPUB) | 471 | 15.5 GB | PDF, TXT, EPUB | |
|
|
| Task 17 (Modern Magisterium) contains a download script for post-1928 Vatican documents. The **script is MIT-licensed**, but the downloaded content is under copyright and is **not included** in the redistributable corpus. |
|
|
| ### Text Extraction |
|
|
| The `text_extraction/` folder contains a ready-to-run pipeline that processes all content files from Tasks 01–17 (PDF, EPUB, HTML, XML) into unified plain `.txt` format. |
|
|
| Pre-extracted plain text (47,407 files, 5.7 GB, 2.64B GPT-2 tokens) is available at [`CatholicCorpus/catholiccorpus-text`](https://huggingface.co/datasets/CatholicCorpus/catholiccorpus-text). |
|
|
| To run it yourself: |
|
|
| ```bash |
| cd text_extraction |
| pip install pdfplumber lxml beautifulsoup4 ebooklib |
| caffeinate -i python3 extract_text.py |
| ``` |
|
|
| ## Provenance |
|
|
| Every downloaded file has a companion `_source.json` sidecar documenting its source URL, license, and download date. |
|
|
| ## Getting Started |
|
|
| ### Browse the Corpus |
|
|
| Each collection folder contains texts organized by author or collection, with `_source.json` sidecars for provenance. |
|
|
| ### Re-download Everything |
|
|
| Each task folder has an idempotent `download_script.py`: |
|
|
| ```bash |
| pip install requests lxml |
| cd 13_mystics && python download_script.py |
| ``` |
|
|
| Scripts skip already-downloaded files and resume cleanly after interruption. |
|
|
| To re-download the entire corpus: |
|
|
| ```bash |
| pip install requests lxml |
| bash run_all.sh |
| ``` |
|
|
| Task 02 (Corpus Corporum) is the longest — expect 12–24 hours for the full Patrologia Latina. |
|
|
| ### Rebuild the Manifest |
|
|
| ```bash |
| python build_manifest.py |
| ``` |
|
|
| Regenerates `master_manifest.json` (machine-readable) and `SUMMARY.md` (human-readable) from disk state. |
|
|
| ## Licensing |
|
|
| The vast majority of this corpus is **public domain** (pre-1928 U.S. publications or authors deceased 70+ years). Two items carry Creative Commons licenses: |
|
|
| - **SBLGNT**: CC BY 4.0 (Society of Biblical Literature) |
| - **Rahlfs Septuagint 1935**: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (Eliran Wong) |
|
|
| See [LICENSE_NOTES.md](LICENSE_NOTES.md) for the full breakdown, and check each file's `_source.json` sidecar for per-item license details. |
|
|
| ## Attribution |
|
|
| If you use this corpus in research, please cite: |
|
|
| > CatholicCorpus — An open-access corpus of Catholic texts for NLP and digital humanities research. https://catholiccorpus.org |
|
|
| See [ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.md](ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.md) for the full list of institutions, projects, and individuals whose work made this possible. |
|
|
| ## Project Structure |
|
|
| ``` |
| CatholicCorpus/ |
| 01_git_repos/ — Git-cloned text repositories |
| 02_corpus_corporum/ — Corpus Corporum Latin texts (TEI XML) |
| 03_gutenberg/ — Project Gutenberg texts |
| ... |
| 16_patrologia_graeca/ — Migne PG volumes |
| 17_modern_magisterium/ — Download script only (content is copyrighted) |
| text_extraction/ — Plain text extraction pipeline (code only, not yet run) |
| stats/ — Tokenization and composition scripts |
| docs/ — Schema documentation |
| archive_helpers.py — Shared archive.org download utilities |
| build_manifest.py — Manifest + summary generator |
| master_manifest.json — Full file inventory (machine-readable) |
| dataset.json — Machine-readable dataset metadata |
| SUMMARY.md — Current corpus statistics |
| LICENSE_NOTES.md — Licensing details |
| LIMITATIONS.md — Known limitations, biases, and scope |
| ROADMAP.md — Versioned release milestones |
| CHANGELOG.md — Version history |
| CONTRIBUTING.md — How to contribute |
| ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.md — Credits and attribution |
| BACKLOG.md — Known gaps and future work |
| LENDING_RESTRICTED.md — Archive.org borrow-only items |
| ``` |
|
|
| ## Limitations |
|
|
| See [LIMITATIONS.md](LIMITATIONS.md) for the full discussion of scope, biases, and known gaps. Key items: |
|
|
| - **Patrologia Graeca vols 16 & 86**: Not found on archive.org (98.8% coverage without them). |
| - **23 archive.org items** are lending-restricted (borrow-only). See [LENDING_RESTRICTED.md](LENDING_RESTRICTED.md). |
| - **Text extraction** not yet run (code included for review). |
| - **Token counts cover text-extractable files only** (2.6B tokens counted; PDF-only collections pending text extraction). |
| - **OCR quality varies** by collection; no systematic scoring performed yet. |
|
|
| ## Requirements |
|
|
| - Python 3.8+ |
| - `requests` and `lxml` (`pip install requests lxml`) |
| - ~40 GB free disk space for the full corpus |
| - Patience for archive.org rate limits |
|
|
| ## License |
|
|
| The **download scripts** in this repository are released under the [MIT License](https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT). The **downloaded content** is subject to the individual licenses documented in each file's `_source.json` sidecar and in [LICENSE_NOTES.md](LICENSE_NOTES.md). |
|
|
